jakal121

That sounds like a solid solution, as long as it allows us to reimage as much as we want

Interesting, just to clarify - is ad activation a mechanism of kms so if we switch to kms - we have an option to have devices activate via AD? - does this work for office as well as windows?

Hi We have been using mak keys for office and windows throughout our infrastructure we have a need to reimage machines more often than not - lab rooms, how difficult would it be to introduce a KMS to handle activations without losing licenses? Would I need to buy a KMS key for every pc to replace the mak keys? or would the key management server pick up that we have a mak environment and takeover activations etc? very very new to licensing for ms, any help would be massive. cost is key - I can't find anything about the cost of a host key price online thanks

Will look into revertable vm's, I knew about snapshots but didn't know they could be set to not retain changes! As for deepfreeze, since these machines are not on a domain and students have full admin rights, they could pretty much remove anything they want, including the deep freeze agent etc In an ideal situation it would be great if there was a solution that worked in the lines of... A deployment server of some sort hooked up directly to the classroom switch that can be enabled remotely...and then the engineer could potentially schedule a reboot and have the image dropped

This may actually work, thanks Eddy - will have a think about it

No problem! thanks for the input

That would be fantastic for us...however we quite literally have each room isolated as students experiment with virus's etc, when we reimage, an engineer will quite literally connect the classroom switch to the ghost server (and disconnect Internet access)

We run courses which require full admin access in our lab rooms so students are able to tinker on Server 2012 with a bunch of linux VM's baked into it Kali etc. Currently we reimage machines using Ghost which seems to be the fastest method for us (120GB images) in under an hour for 30 odd PC's However, this requires an engineer to be present. Keen to know what other viable methods exist out there, especially if there is a solution that doesn't require a body present (just to add deepfreeze type apps would become tedious as students could probably remove the app with admin access easily)