Lab/Image Freezing - What are you using?

[Carter]

For some years now we have been using Faronics DeepFreeze to freeze all of our labs and it's helped us out a lot. Without it I'm sure our workload would climb big time but with that said, I know many do not use DeepFreeze.

If you are running a different setup, what are you doing? I know re-imaigng on weekends is done by some on a schedule but this is a bit hard where our labs are used 7 days a week. I know DeployStudio has a "Freeze Home Folder" option but this wont work as we need to also look after the root drive, applications etc.

Just wondering as I can't seem to find many options out there.

Thanks!

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[Tsonga]

+1 for Deepfreeze

[jamesfed]

A bit of a longer term thing to look into however VDI maybe an option, most setups have the ablity to restore a image back to its golden state the moment the user loggs off.

[Carter]

+1 for Deepfreeze

DeepFreeze is great but over priced when it comes to large enterprise. We are already looking at getting rid of it for PC's & I'd like to get on board with that with the Macs.

A bit of a longer term thing to look into however VDI maybe an option, most setups have the ablity to restore a image back to its golden state the moment the user loggs off.

VDI, Citrix or Virtual Environments would not workout in our situation. To be running all the required software doing this would be very slow. We are a big user of Citrix here at the college but for the Macs it's not a great option. users need a Mac environment & apps not Windows and when it comes to high ende applications Virtual just does not meet the performance needs even with a Gigabit Network & high end clients. I do like VDI but would not work well with this type of Mac environment.

[dbhbbc]

If you have an OSX server, you could potentially netboot your macs from a golden image. It's kind of like VDI in that it should reset to the default state when rebooted, but it is an OSX environment running on the machine locally (just booted over the network). However, not sure how long it would take to boot a large image.

[Arthur]

Could you not set the Mac's to automatically login with the built-in guest account? Any changes will be lost when they logout.

[-Tim]

We prefer to lock everything down with workgroup manager instead of imaging periodically or freezing the home directory. We do image once or twice per year to give the iMacs a fresh start.