Afternoon folks,

I am a Network Technician in a large factory and I am looking for ways to improve our Imaging strategy. Currently, we create images of all of our production related computers twice a year and store them on a dedicated server. We are using Ghost v 8. The way we are doing it now is to set up a computer on a cart and take it from machine to machine making individual images and then transferring them with a crossover cable to a dedicated server. This can be very time consuming. Currently we have about one hundred computers that we image twice a year and that number is going to increase. Aside from the time consuming task of physically visiting each machine, the other problem is that the images are only done twice a year so any changes that are made between images are not included. The result is that when we restore an image, we have to go back and manually copy any files that were changed.

It makes more sense to have the developers make a new image whenever there is a change so that we always have a current image. To do that, we would need to ensure that they could easily create a new Ghost image across the network. What I am looking for are recommendations on how we might improve the way we do things and if it is worth upgrading to a newer version of Ghost.

Thanks in advance for your feedback.

Thanks for the response. I'll have to check and see if we have the full version, but I am guessing we do. Do you know if the method you described requires that you boot the client computer to a bootdisk? And does the Newest version of Corporate Ghost contain enough features to upgrade?

Again, thanks for the help. I'm researching this on my own but wanted to get feedback from others as well.

NightOwl wrote on Nov 29^th, 2007 at 12:06pm:

Correct; but then, that's already in the version they have. That capability existed since corporate 6.0 (originally through a dedicated partition, which we still support, and then through virtual partition in version 7).

Similarly, multicast image distribution is already a part of what they have, but not being used.

Quote:

Other notable features: User Migration. File preservation during cloning. Support for Sysprep. Support for 64-bit XP/Windows 2003 as well as Vista. Making bootable USB devices in the Boot Wizard. More support for Linux.

Plus, of course, lots of small improvements ("gravel", in our project parlance) that are individually small but make some things much easier. For instance, there's an option in Ghost32 under WinPE that can automount a newly-cloned filesystem on a specified drive letter so it's easy to script customizations.