Does anyone out there use ghost to image PCs? I work in an environment that has about 5500 pcs across 4 or 5 different models. What I've done in the past is created a master image of each model and stored it on a hard drive. Every time we get a new PC I install the image. This way each and every PC in the environment is the configured the same across the board.
How are people doing this? It isn't rocket science yet I can't seem to find a way that is simple...
Well an enterprise site license of Ghost is ridiculously expensive. Right now we are using Zen imaging from Novell since we already own a site license for Zen works, and it is part of Zenworks. It is based off of Linux and supports netbooting and multi casting. Ghost is one of the best products out there but it is also ungodly expensive and that is exactly why we do not run Ghost at my work.
A free solution I have used in the past that is great is DRBL and is completely open source and Linux based. It's only draw back is that it has to be your DHCP server for it to function. Now what I did was build a box in my office that ran DRBL and imaged everything in there on its own little LAN off of our network and that worked great. If you wanted to deploy something like that in your current infrastructure you would have to either set up DRBL as your main DHCP server, which would probably be a pain, or set up what is called a DHCP Proxy, which is possible. Since it is based of PXE booting no boot disks are required and you can password protect it so end users can't just reimage things. It is fully compatible with the windows environment and I have used it to roll out tons of laptops/desktops that run windows XP Pro.
There are lots of factors when imaging over a giant network. Are you planning on multicasting and uni-casting? What switches do you use? Are they managed, have port fast enabled, and run spanning-tree, or something similar? Do you have fiber backbone? Are your servers clustered?
There is basically 1,000s of ways to do this, and they range from free open source or like $70k site licenses for Ghost. If you own Licenses of win2k3 server I think you can use a package called WDS (windows deployment server), but I think it can only run if you have SMS running but I can't quite recall because I never used it. I have only seen demos of it at MS training seminars.
http://drbl.sourceforge.net/
