Sysprep SAN Volume - clonning HELP!!!

[bertieuk]

We have a SAN which we boot from. The SAN allows the cloning of volumes. We thought this would be great to quickly roll out bootable volumes for new 2003 servers.

Started looking at sysprep. There doesn't seem to be any concise detailed help on practical configuration.

Anyway, I have managed to sysprep the volume after adding "LegacyNic=1" in the sysprep.ini file (still not totally sure what this does). The problem I seem to have is when the new prepped volume is booted, it wants to initialise the network cards which chops the iSCSI feed to the SAN. The whole thing just stops where it is.

Is there anyway around this?
Is there any good practical howtos out there?

I do have a local HD in each server which is planned for swap info only but could I use this to help through this sysprep?

The servers I am using are Dell 850s and 1850s

Thanks

Si

 

[comtec17]

You are booting using an iSCSI volume? Cloning a LUN on a Storage Array is not intended to "Ghost" machines for images, it was intended for Disaster Recovery. Also note that most vendors do not support booting from an iSCSI LUN especially Microsoft.

 

[bertieuk]

We are using iscsi volumes and are using emBOOT's netboot/i to boot to each volume. I believe that emBoot work very closely with Microsoft for approval.

As far as the SAN and the DELL servers that we use are concerned, there is very little difference to the way that blade servers deploy.

We have a master image which we can clone in minutes and deploy onto new servers. The only thing I am currently concerned about is ensuring the SID and name are changed across the cloned volumes.

I have now started using sysinternal's NewSID which gives both SID and name options.

My next stage is to script and automate as much as possible.

Si

 

[comtec17]

I know I did not really answer your question above, and I really do not have a good answer for you. I can though tell you that when I use a cloning technique such as Ghost or VMWare clones, I use sysprep to change the SID and usernames on the machine, that is it.

I can say though that since you are changing a NIC driver during sysprep, you will continuously run into this problem as the iSCSI driver is bound to the NIC and driver configured on the clone.

I would recommend in this instance to clone only to simular hardware (NIC).

Sorry I could not provide more help than that...

 

[bertieuk]

Yippee done it.

You can tell sysprep to leave the network alone.....refer to

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windows2000serv/deploy/depopt/simw2kdd.mspx

Although it applies to w2k pro, it worked very well on the windows 2003 server.

I can now deploy a new server in less then 10 minutes

Onto post build scripting.

Thanks
Si