Products besides Ghost for imaging 100 NT Servers

[ner0z]

We are rolling out 100 NT4 servers in a test farm and was wondering if anyone has used some good products for imaging.
These will be with raid 5 on them so it does need to support that.

 

[born2network]

try a company called image cast

http://www.imagecast.com

 

[SteelDragon]

You can also try PowerQuest(

http://www.powerquest.com),

the makers of Partition Magic, they have a program called Drive Image/Drive Image Pro that works like a champ!!

Good Luck,
SteelDragon

 

[reiziger]

Yeah, I've heard good things about ImageCast. I found a demo version here:

http://www.ics-iq.com/downloads.cfm

Might wanna try that before you actually buy a copy of anything.

 

[skimmilk]

Drive Image does not work with NT Server. Believe it or not we used NT's built in Mirroring to clone a disk through Disk Administrator and it worked flawless.
Good Luck

 

[SteelDragon]

Milkey,
you are correct, but if you use Drive image from a NT wks, or a 9X machine you can clone an NT server, believe me, I've done it... Where theres a will, theres ALWAYS a way.



SteelDragon

 

[bookouri]

how does that mirroring through disk administrator work? Ive been using ghost to clone workstations but i now need to clone a server. The server is running on a raid disk array and I need to clone it to another raid array so ghost wont do it for me.

 

[Zelandakh]

Mirroring is a great cheats way of doing it.

You get the server working fine, add another disk and mirror it. The OS copies all the data to the new drive. Down it and pull the drive. Put that drive in another machine and boot up. Then do the same to those 2 servers...

Repeat as necessary. The only thing you get is duplicate SIDs for the server, so you may want to invest in a SID changer if you being thorough.

 

[WilWolitski]

You are missing a fundamental concern!
If you're creating servers, they will ALL need unique SIDs, plus I believe the RAID configuration will also offer some problems (although this is speculation as I haven't tried it). After you dump the image then you'll need to go to each and every single machine and modify[ol][li]NetBIOS computer name[/li][li]host name[/li][li]IP address if not DHCP[/li][li]security ID # (SID) (SID changer utility required)[/li][li]numerous registry concerns[/li][li]...and so on...[/li][/ol]You should SERIOUSLY consider scripting your installations using answer files and script files using the sysdiff and windiff utilities. The advantages are: [ul][li]EACH installation is customized[/li][li]you won't need to revisit each PC after installation[/li][li]the registry will be pure[/li][li]you can do many (if not all) machines simultaneously[/li][li]it will take seconds to modify a script should you decide to change one small factor as opposed many minutes (as much as an hour) to re-create an image[/li][/ul]
In my opinion that's the smart way of doing it I
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