Best for imaging

[Theory]

I use Clonezilla, which hasn't let me down so far, and it's free

It's also super easy to use.

[Guest obsidianpillar]

Hi all, having been a Mac school for nearly 7 or so years now, it looks like the new principal is wanting to move back to Windows. Over that time I have become a little rusty so I'm brushing up on a few things. Back then we used to use Symantec Ghost for imaging but I'm guessing time has move on an there maybe many more options available now. We will most probably be going W10 and will also need to deploy a number of apps / software; Office, SIMS client etc. Looking for opinions on imaging software. We were a team of four (network manager, asst. manager, and two techies), but now we are down to just two of us, so ease of use and speed will also be a plus :-)

 

Many thanks.

Hi, without reading any of the comments below I propose the following:

 

1) Domain - you only need 1 - "old" "Curriculum" and "Admin" stuff's gone out of the window now. If we were talking WS 2003 era, possibly however all new builds regardless of sector it's 1 domain.

2) Separation of Roles on Servers - a given and most probably already covered

3) Imaging - Depends on costs, MDT if you want Free and easy - SCCM if you want more control but comes with a price tag - Don't use Multicast in WDS!

4) Building a VM - Use Hyper-V or whatever you want to virtualise, do a checkpoint before capturing on the hypervisor so it circumvents the 3 Sysprep limit.

5) Apps - You could use RDS and RemoteApp if you want to virtually host stuff, or deploy locally as part of a task sequence with your deployment tool/Group Policy.

 

W/ regards to your image - I always go "Thin" i.e no applications and just updates/customisations (<-- I don't even do those), just as a way to decrease the raw deployment - that way you can customise on a task sequence basis rather than a massive fat image to deploy over the network.

 

Hope this helps.

 

Tom

[manamaga2512]

Hi, without reading any of the comments below I propose the following:

 

2) Separation of Roles on Servers - a given and most probably already covered

 

Tom

 

Thanks for that Tom. We are actually lucky enough to be able to purchase a couple of brand new servers so I'll have a new dedicated server which I'll be using to host and deploy images :-) . I think the majority vote goes to MDT given our staffing situation and I have a really good relationship with our supplier of the servers, who are going to help me setup MDT on site as they are very local (double smiley :-) :-)

 

We've dumped 'admin' and 'curric' domains a number of years ago now when we went Apple, so that's a plus. With regards to your point number 2 "Separation of roles" - Please could you elaborate? It's only very recently that I've been dipping my toe into the server side of things since the departure of my network manager just before Christmas. Prior to that (and indeed after that) I've been given no training, so it's been a whirlwind of googling, youtube and of course this very forum for it's invaluable help and support.

 

Many thanks.

[Davit2005]

 

DHCP is run from the switches on our network, we do not have the role on our server. Unfortunately they are managed by an external company and so any configuration changes will cost (and actually I have no clue what to ask them to do anyway).

?

 

You jus need an additional ip helper address pointing to the WDS/PXE boot server on each vlan you intend to boot off the network. I'd be surprised if the support company need that told to them. If they do then they shouldn't be supporting the network.

 

Also surprised they are running the DHCP server from the router. Much easier to manage on a server.

[Guest obsidianpillar]

Hi,

 

Good to hear that you've got some new Servers on the way! Are you planning to virtualise (I'd recommend this 100%!) or do standalone?

 

Plus that you've got support locally to do MDT, watch your life become a lot easier with regards to deployments! Ours is practically zero touch now (i.e push power and F12 < SCCM I believe can automate this, but that just makes us look lazy doing that!

 

Kudos to you for only having one Domain, it's a massive headache having two! In regards to separation of roles I'm talking about having "service" elements distributed equally, i.e don't have an "all eggs in one basket approach".

 

We have the following as a principle to follow:

* vDC-01 - Domain Controller, DNS, DHCP

* vFS-01 - File Services, WSUS,

* vMGMT-01 - Sophos Enterprise Console, UniFi (Wireless Controller), Print Services

* vWEB-HOST-01 - Self explanatory

 

You basically don't want to have a central point of failure if something goes wrong - you want things to be split up to minimise downtime in the event of a problem. As your looking at having multiple servers, have a look at replication (if your using Hyper-V - again I 100% recommend this for ease of use and integration, AVMA etc...)

 

I use Macs in my other job, love them to bits. Just make sure you don't set your FQDN of your AD Domain to end in ".local"! Microsoft I believe recommends the following now for AD - "INTERNALDOMAIN.EXTERNALDOMAIN.WHATEVER" e.g ours is "DOMAIN..COM" which we've had no problems with, even using Exchange 2013.

 

Again, feel free to reply if you need any further help. We've all been in the same boat as you once!

 

Tom

 

 

Thanks for that Tom. We are actually lucky enough to be able to purchase a couple of brand new servers so I'll have a new dedicated server which I'll be using to host and deploy images :-) . I think the majority vote goes to MDT given our staffing situation and I have a really good relationship with our supplier of the servers, who are going to help me setup MDT on site as they are very local (double smiley :-) :-)

 

We've dumped 'admin' and 'curric' domains a number of years ago now when we went Apple, so that's a plus. With regards to your point number 2 "Separation of roles" - Please could you elaborate? It's only very recently that I've been dipping my toe into the server side of things since the departure of my network manager just before Christmas. Prior to that (and indeed after that) I've been given no training, so it's been a whirlwind of googling, youtube and of course this very forum for it's invaluable help and support.

 

Many thanks.

[manamaga2512]

OK, so I got a quote for a new server and, although we have the funds to buy, I think it maybe a little OTT. Considering it will only used for MDT and hosting images, opinions on the spec and prices would be much appreciated. I've obviously omitted the company details. The first screenshot is of the server and the second screenshot is 'recommended upgrades':

 

 

 

Many thanks for your thoughts :-)

[PyROm]

We have fog imaging running on an old i5 pc with a couple of harddrives in raid mirror holding the image, we then have a nas box that fog replicates with as a backup, probably total cost £500 max. and even that is ott for fog.

[LytchettNM]

OK, so I got a quote for a new server and, although we have the funds to buy, I think it maybe a little OTT. Considering it will only used for MDT and hosting images, opinions on the spec and prices would be much appreciated. I've obviously omitted the company details. The first screenshot is of the server and the second screenshot is 'recommended upgrades':

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]42567[/ATTACH]

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]42568[/ATTACH]

 

Many thanks for your thoughts :-)

 

Wow this does seem a little on the high side for a stand alone server to me, but saying that we had a really great deal with a local hardware vendor just over 2 years ago and replaced our 25 physical servers with 6 hosts and now run everything as a VM within a cluster, so the point is our deployment server is a VM which means for us during the normal day to day I can run it with just 4 vCPU's and when we are re-imaging the school I can increase the vCPU's to cope with demand plus as the server is a VM the whole thing is on our SAN which has very good IOPS so we can deploy a suite in about 40/45 mins which works very well.

We also use the database option within MDT and populate it with the MAC address of the workstations so it assigns the name to each workstation and correct image.

We have 3 images 'general' for about 80% of our workstations and the other 2 are for our 'media' and 'music' departments due to the amount of specific software these department need installed.

It's well worth the time to understand the power of MDT/WDS as once setup for your school it will save you loads of time, we have not been brave enough yet to go completely zero touch for the deployment but have customised the deployment wizard so there's only 2 options which are pre-populated with the computers name and image so it can be checked at the workstation as I final check before deployment.

Edited April 8, 2017 by Techforyou