3 Disk-Imaging Solutions

Windows Vista has been available for over a year now, and as this article goes to print, Vista SP1 is just hitting TechNet. Now it’s time to start thinking about how to deploy this major upgrade. If your company has only a few computers, the notion of physically visiting each one is probably reasonable. But if you’re looking at hundreds or even thousands of machines, a disk-imaging product is essential for saving hours of valuable time. Instead of scurrying around to find a copy of the OS, the license key, and someone to babysit an installation, you can use a disk-imaging product to quickly lay down a master image of a hard disk to one or more computers. Of course, to justify the overhead of creating and maintaining that master image, you need to consider how many computers you have in your environment and how many you deploy per year. Those numbers are different for every company, but suffice it to say that an administrator who oversees only 10 computers probably won’t be able to justify the expense.

In this comparative review, I examine three disk-imaging solutions: Acronis Snap Deploy 2.0, Paragon Deployment Manager 8.5 System Builder Edition, and Symantec Ghost Solution Suite. I’m hoping my findings will help you determine which of these products would be best suited to helping you deploy Vista in your environment. To test each product, I used built-in feature sets for deploying a new OS. Each network had a dedicated server running a management console, from which I could manage remote machines, and one other Vista and Windows XP client to test remote management. Each product uses a similar process of copying an entire hard disk to an image file (or files). This image file serves as a master image that the product then copies to a new PC’s hard disk. All three products can utilize a multicast technology with which multiple PCs can receive the master image simultaneously.

Acronis Snap Deploy 2.0
Like the other two companies in this review, Acronis offers a suite of products that target complex disk-imaging projects. I narrowed down to Acronis Snap Deploy for the purposes of this comparative review.

Installation. On the Acronis.com Web site, I found a useful Getting Started guide that helped me begin the installation process. The installation consists of five separate applications, four of which—Management Console, License Server, OS Deploy Server, and PXE Server—are typically installed on one dedicated server. The fifth component is the Management Agent, which you can install on remote clients to permit remote management.

Installing the Management Console and License Server is straightforward. However, be sure to add the licenses you’ve purchased from Acronis before attempting to install the OS Deploy Server; if you don’t, the OS Deploy Server installation will fail when it can’t find any valid licenses. Applying the licenses to the server is a relatively simple process of typing one or more serial numbers. From an email message I received from Acronis, I had five 25-character licenses to type in, and I discovered that they weren’t easy to just copy and paste. Fortunately, I was able to save time by copying the serial numbers into a simple text file and importing them.

Installing the OS Deploy application requires a reboot. If you plan to use a production server to host this portion of Acronis Snap Deploy, be sure to take this necessity into account. The PXE Server element—the final installation piece—installs very quickly and is further configured in the Management Console through a simple wizard. You can also choose to use the PXE server that comes with Remote Installation Service (RIS).

New OS deployment. Like most imaging products, Acronis Snap Deploy recommends that you use Sysprep on the master PC before creating a master image. To create the master image, you can use the Management Agent, but the manual advises against doing so. I decided to use the built-in PXE Server to capture a master image of the Vista PC. I also tried the Create Bootable Media option to produce a bootable disk, ISO image, or RIS server file because some PCs aren’t PXE-enabled. Regardless of whether you boot using the built-in PXE Server, the RIS PXE server, or bootable media, the process is the same: You use the wizard to choose the hard drive to be imaged, select a location to store the image file, select the compression level, and insert any comments you want to add to the image.

At this point, you can also set the IP address, subnet mask, default gateway, and DNS and WINS server if your network doesn’t use DHCP. Through this wizard, you can set the Ethernet speed—a useful setting if, for example, your network engineer sets the switches to 100/FULL. It’s important that you configure the same setting (i.e., AUTO or 100/Full ) on both the network switch and the PC. If one device is set to AUTO and the other to 100/FULL, the NIC will default to 100/Half Duplex and the disk deployment will take an extremely long time.

After you create the master image, you can deploy it to other computers. To do so, you can use the same method you used for taking the image—by utilizing the PXE Server, RIS method, or boot disk. You can also use the Remote Management Console to deploy images. To do so, the target PCs must already have an OS installed and running, and the management agent must be installed. Acronis Snap Deploy also supports images created by Acronis True Image. Figure 1 shows remote clients standing by, ready to accept the new master image.

Additional features. Uniquely, Acronis Snap Deploy allows automatic transfer of files to PCs after the image has been applied. The product’s Acronis Universal Deploy—an add-on option—permits physical- to-virtual (P2V) and virtual-to-physical (V2P) migrations and gives you a great way to deploy images to dissimilar hardware. Acronis Snap Deploy also offers remotemanagement capabilities: After you install the Snap Deploy Management Agent on the target PC, you can manage files, execute applications remotely, and even schedule tasks through the Management Console. That being said, I wasn’t terribly impressed with the product’s remote file-management capabilities, which I can perform with a simple UNC path (e.g., \\computername c$). Also, I could perform most of the features of the Scheduled Tasks tool through Group Policy. Still, remote management is a nice addition.

Help and support. Acronis has a limited support Web site with only a few Knowledge Base articles relating to Snap Deploy. The site’s “online chat” services helped me find answers that I needed, but I endured a long wait; it took two to three minutes for a technician to respond. At one point, an obviously multitasking technician pasted someone else’s answer in my window.

Paragon Deployment Manager 8.5 System Builder Edition
Paragon Software Group offers quite a few backup, disk-imaging, and partition-management products for the business and the home. There’s even a product for completely wiping your hard disk—useful when you’re retiring old systems. A few of the company’s products tackle disk imaging, but after careful consideration, I chose to examine Paragon Deployment Manager 8.5 System Builder Edition.

Installation. The very clean Paragon Deployment Manager installation routine installs five components: Hard Disk Manager, PXE Server, Infrastructure Server, Deployment Console, and Boot Media Builder. You can install all the components on the same machine or individually onto separate machines if you want to distribute the workload. A DHCP server is available if you don’t already have one on your network. Be sure to read the DHCP Server installation screen carefully; the Yes, there is no DHCP server option can be a bit confusing if you don’t read the entire screen. If you already have a DHCP server, the manual provides step-by-step instructions for how to configure the correct DHCP server options to permit the use of the PXE Server component.

Continue to page 2

   Previous  [1]  2  Next