Looking for a simple & free deployment for Windows?

[Carter]

I primarily use DeployStudio for Mac deployment and I have used WDS & Ghost but I need a product that's free.

 

I volunteer a week each year to Skills Canada which is a national event which is the same as Skills USA SkillsUSA: Champions at Work as it is also a Worlds event event every two years. Anyways myself and a couple others are the techs for the national event and we need to find a solution for easy deployment. We have hundreds of computers and each competition that can range from a few computers to 30-40 computers are all setup on the fly where ever we can place tables, run power and networking.

 

We build our images at the start of the week and have a couple days to image everything and usually ranges from 5-8 images. Ghosting is only done over the course of 2-3days.

 

From what I understand WDS needs to use sysprep which we want to stay away from. We just want to do a straight up clone/ghost. Symantec Ghost we almost bought 4 license for four servers until we realized we need to have a license per machine.

 

I've used Clonezilla before but only to boot computers to our WDS server. Does CloneZilla have a PXE server part to it to host the images and connect to?

 

Thank you for your feedback!

 

.

[Gaz]

Try this FOG Project I use it and its great, takes a bit of getting used to but its quite widely used on Edugeek.

[localzuk]

Yeah, Fog is ideal for your purpose. The install isn't too complex and it is super simple to actually operate - click and go pretty much.

[cpjitservices]

I recommend FOG, there is Clonezilla too.

[3s-gtech]

FOG has been our imaging solution for 8 years now. Very easy to setup, and rarely needs maintaining. Make sure you have plenty of storage on the server, and use a Linux distribution which is closest in use to the available tutorials - like Debian or Ubuntu (unless you're a Linux pro, in which case go for whatever).

[mikeyd101]

Clonezilla server (DRBL Project)

 

Clonezilla - Sever Edition

 

I have tried both WDS and Clonezilla server to try and setup multicast deployment, I was unsuccessful with both and not sure why. however we did manage to use clonezilla server to unicast deployment successfully.

 

I used these steps to setup and clone the image, deployment was slightly different being only unicast (there's an option on the menu)

 

Imaging School Computers for Free with Clonezilla Server

 

Once you have your images captured just a case of selecting the right image you want to deploy on server and PXE booting the client.

 

Best bit was it was free, apart from my time to figure it all out.

 

**** NOTE ****

 

This is not for the faint hearted, it works pretty well when setup (apart from my lack of getting multicast working) I was able to unicast image 5 machines at once over 100mb (server on 1000mb) link. It did however take me a couple of days to get everything setup and working and requires being comfortable with linux (or at least have very good troubleshooting skills).

 

We also setup a self contained build network to stop any issues with dhcp / PXE (a seperate switch on the desk) and also to keep the build image traffic off our main network, as we were aiming for 20-40 machine deployments. We had about a 35gb image and took around 50 mins to deploy

[cpjitservices]

@mikeyd101 you may need to enable multicasting on your network switches.

@Carter - I'm glad your using Ghost. Those where the good old says. I still have my copy of Ghost and one day it will reign again!

Edited April 20, 2015 by cpjitservices

[Carter]

Ok so after some testing Clonezilla SE is the winner. It's a breeze to setup and it just works. I've tested this for creating an image and deploying to one off machines as well as multicasting. Using the Clonezilla Live SE I just need the Distro on a USB stick and plug it into any laptop we will use for imaging.

 

As for FOG Project I'll have to have a look. Does FOG work for Windows and Mac or primarily just Windows?

[mikeyd101]

@mikeyd101 you may need to enable multicasting on your network switches.

@Carter - I'm glad your using Ghost. Those where the good old says. I still have my copy of Ghost and one day it will reign again!

 

 

I did check the multicast switch setting (Extreme x250e-48t), but multicast was working, it would start but always fail client side 5-10 minutes in, was deploying to all identical laptops. I also tried a 3com spare switch we had with same results. I did do 1 successful 2 machine multicast deployment in my testing but as soon as I tried 4+ failed, even going back to 2 machines failed, so must have been a 1 off fluke.

 

Took alot longer to image 100 laptops, with another 50 delivered today would be nice to image 25 at a go, instead of 5.

 

Hopefully I'll get back to it and chase down the issue. Something I was hoping to save time cost me time.

Edited April 20, 2015 by mikeyd101

[mikeyd101]

if you have it setup in standalone environment I run into a few gotchas, initally I think dhcp / drbl is setup with 12 addresses, you have to edit the /etc/dhcpd.conf to get more dhcp addresses and reconfigure the server drblimp or something like that for impatient configuration, possibly I changed something else too.

[Gaz]

Ok so after some testing Clonezilla SE is the winner. It's a breeze to setup and it just works. I've tested this for creating an image and deploying to one off machines as well as multicasting. Using the Clonezilla Live SE I just need the Distro on a USB stick and plug it into any laptop we will use for imaging.

 

As for FOG Project I'll have to have a look. Does FOG work for Windows and Mac or primarily just Windows?

 

I've just taken a look at Clonezillas site, the interface looks primarily DOS style based FOG will work on Windows, Mac OSX, Linux and multiboot. FOG is much more than just imaging, it will make an inventory of each host which was a massive time saver for me recently as I needed the serial numbers of the computers so instead of going around each room to get the serial number FOG as part of the host registration process gets the spec of the machine including the serial number. Its got tools too so you can do WOL, memtest86, virus scan, password reset, disk testing, different types of remote formatting and more...

[Carter]

Imaging is all we need for Skills. We literally setup mobile computer labs then image them. They are only used for two days and once the contests are over all of the computers are torn down and go back to the company they are rented/donated by.

 

I'll have a look at FOG as well but right now I don't have much free time so I'll run with Clonezilla as I know it has worked for me with my testing.

[Gaz]

Ah fair enough. Good luck with the competitions.

[browolf]

A nice thing about fog is that it can auto-rename computers and join them to the domain, but it is a lot more involved than clonezilla.

[cpjitservices]

You've said your using Ghost ... Why not stick with Ghost ? if you've got it you've already paid for it ?

 

Ghost is as good as anything, Ghost is brilliant.

[Carter]

You've said your using Ghost ... Why not stick with Ghost ? if you've got it you've already paid for it ?

 

Ghost is as good as anything, Ghost is brilliant.

 

Would love to use it but Symantec gave me a big run around talking to people to get it donated for two days. I thought about getting the organization to but it but Ghost requires you to buy a license per machine and we have hundreds. Not worth it for a couple days use then not used until next year.

 

When talking to Symantec some of their reps didn't even know if they still sell it, if it's in another suite or what. They could have had free sponsorship at the competitions as many companies donate and it's published but symantec just gave me the run around.

 

.

 

.

[mikeyd101]

I started looking at fog yesterday, and looks very good and a possible solution for our imaging needs replacing wds. Being able to assign an image and re-image will be great. Obviously there is some leg work getting all the required images and name/macs/groupings for all the existing machines.

 

Thanks to everyone that mentioned it above, that gave me the push to check into it.

 

Fingers crossed that multicast will work also.

[halbaradkenafin]

We were using MDT and it works pretty well, it's built on top of WDS but you can just give it an iso and it will create a basic image for you which can then be customised with drivers specific to hardware at build rather than bloating the base image. You can also import applications and have them install during build, a bit more work than having an image with all your software installed but makes updating images a lot easier. I've looked at FOG in the past but never got a chance to try it out properly.

[CraigM]

Originally used FOG to image our XP machines back in the day, but eventually got tired of the project not having any progress for a few years. Made supporting Windows 7 much harder, as FOG at the time didn't do 7 very well. After learning MDT, I don't think I could ever go back now, and it helps that MDT is free - you just need a valid Windows Server 2008 and later running to get the job done.