Hi chaps.

Yet another question on my noob Windows administrator experience.

This time, it's regarding deploying images or pre-prepared OS installs.

As some software components are not purely MSI-deployable, it's not possible to easily deploy a "standard base XP install" and then remotely tag on the extra apps through group policy. The only way we can easily deploy the fully-prepared PC is through imaging.

Up till now, we have used Ghost 2003 to deploy workstation images. The image was taken from bootable CD, with the PC out of the domain. We then duplicate the image, reboot each newly-imaged PC, change PC name, IP address then join the domain.

Question is that we would like to offer this to the customer, but of course, licencing comes into play - we have a licence for "internal" Ghost imaging, but it's not something we can pass as-is on to the customer.

At one site / customer (customer "A"), they use MS's SMS 2003. This looks great, and provides built-in support for "image" type deployment. However, I gather there's a licencing cost, not just for the server end, but also for each managed client end. Now we would never need an "online" management so you can push out MSI installers and the like - we're looking purely at getting a PC prepared for the end user.

Am I right in believing that only SMS provides built-in / Microsoft-supported imaging tools?

Of course, it looks like customer A is geared up for deploying images through SMS and as they already use it to manage their various other PCs, I don't think it would be too hard to prepare a master PC for imaging, get them to create the SMS image and then handle it.

However, for other sites where SMS is not available, what do you recommend?

- Purchase SMS licence. If we do that, do we still need a CML (client management licence) for every PC considering that SMS will only be used for image distribution and not live MSI installation or other fancier things such as asset tracking and all that mallarky.

- Use some other imaging platform? If so, we can then prepare the bootable section of it, and make it available through PXE and RIS (RIS is still free of charge, right ?!?). What do you think, keeping licencing cost and simplicity in mind.

Thanks in advance

I used to install a machine with all the drivers you could possibly every want for your hardware configs (ours were heterogeneous) then run sysprep and then image using ghost.

I'd swap ghost of acronis imaging software these days but the principle is the same. The licensing is quite reasonable too IMHO.

I haven't played around with Acronis before. Presumably, you can set it up so it's bootable over PXE and executable via RIS ?

Also having a look at PING as an opensource freeware alternative. So far, looks promising and has managed to detect the SAS controller and read the data off the NTFS partitions. I know PING is PXE/RIS capable so may try that as a cost-free alternative.

The thing is I have over 60 workstations to setup. All their hardware is identical so using imaging of some kind makes sense and will save a lot of time. Installing all the apps on top of the base image is about 30-40 minutes per PC and I don't want to spend a weekend doing just that on 60+ boxes!

Will look into Acronis though.

Why not install the apps on the master imagea machine then sysprep then image ?

I haven't played around with Acronis before. Presumably, you can set it up so it's bootable over PXE and executable via RIS ?

Also having a look at PING as an opensource freeware alternative. So far, looks promising and has managed to detect the SAS controller and read the data off the NTFS partitions. I know PING is PXE/RIS capable so may try that as a cost-free alternative.

The thing is I have over 60 workstations to setup. All their hardware is identical so using imaging of some kind makes sense and will save a lot of time. Installing all the apps on top of the base image is about 30-40 minutes per PC and I don't want to spend a weekend doing just that on 60+ boxes!

Will look into Acronis though.

What I was suggesting above is installing everything you need on a single machine, then you can either CD or PXE boot the acronis software and image the HDD from a network drive.

All the machines would then be ready and you would just need a small script run after install to change the name and put it on the network domain correctly.

When I did the same i had a couple of hundred non identical machines and they all were done from one of two images. The only difference was the apps installed on the images as both were full of a different set of heavy duty engineering tools.