Pleonasm wrote on Jan 10^th, 2008 at 10:05am:

I'm not (since I don't have any communication with the team that produces that product), although that's a distinct possibility. I'm just pointing out that it's not logically necessary for a second snapshot driver to be there, but it is logically necessary (for V2i) for a change-bitmap component to be there.

There are lots of reasons why they might have left it in place - in software development, it's usually better for the health of the code to avoid special cases and complex processes; it's far, far better for a product to do things consistently rather than be a tangled mess.

Indeed, if it's working fine, it takes developer time and effort to change process, they have no real incentive to move to a different system. It's usually better for the customers and the code, to leave a component like that alone and work on things of more value instead. No-one is a big fan of change for change's sake.

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No. Nothing here relates to V2i - genuine Ghost and V2i no longer share any management. Mid last year GSS was reorganized under Altiris; you may note that Altiris don't have any consumer products.

The V2i people still get to keep our brand, and still get to release their consumer product, while we work on making GSS play well in the Altiris environment - Ghost is intended to become the primary imaging component for the Altiris products, as well as having GSS continue. That's more than enough on our plate.

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That team, in that division, can still do whatever they want. I don't know what they (or their management) want.

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Yes, as it was originally intended that it do from about the release of Windows XP SP2 onwards. There were ... non-technical ... factors that stopped that coming about, but with those now resolved we're moving forward again.

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Precisely that.

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I have no idea. I believe the corporate version of V2i has such a thing too, but what their plans and concepts for the consumer version of V2i are I have no insight.

It most certainly will continue to image offline, of course.  Doing anything else for a deployment product would be amazingly stupid and counterproductive anyway, but we have additional reasons to keep it that way.

What I said about consistency of process is the key. Ghost can already clone pretty much everything except system volumes within Windows, so for us the biggest thing volume snapshot does is makes that reliable and seamless - it removes a wart.

And consistently of process applies not just to the program itself! GSS - like most software - exists to support what people want to do. Ghost imaging can be used in so many ways, the context each customer brings is really important; and what they do with Ghost to fit it into their context results in their customized process. Which in a business environment, is quite likely to get written down.

So, we're very cautious about doing anything that will force people to change the way they work with Ghost, so that upgrades don't involve everyone having to stop and change what they do. Even when it'd be better for folks to change process, we try to let them make any transition on their own terms in their own time.

As I said, one of the big business objectives for Ghost is to become the primary imaging engine for the Altiris products (which used a tool called RapidDeploy). Part of Ghost fitting into that is for the cloning engine to support the same choices of pre-OS environments and working styles as RapidDeploy does, so that any process transition to Ghost is as easy as we can make it.