Ghost Solution Suite

Hi there everyone,

I'm kinda new here so if I ask something REALLY stupid, please don't bite my head off!

I've been asked by my new boss to "Learn how Ghost Suite works, as we're deploying it on customer sites next week".  My previous experience is mainly 1st line stuff so i'm feeling a little thrown in the deep end with this and probably doing more worrying than needed.

The current situation is that i can hapilly create images and restore them acorss a whole host of machines (Dell desktop images go on toshiba laptops, HP desktops, and all vice versa).  I've spent AGES creating various boot disks that work across all the machines i've tested it on so far (a worry for me is that alot of the machines i'll be deploying images onto, I will not get a chance to look at or work with until I arrive on customer sites and will then be required to get everything upgraded and working without any problems happening!!) and i'm pretty much happy with everything i've done so far.

My main worry is that i'm expected to be able to create an image on (for example) a Dell desktop and be able to deploy it on an HP PC without any extra configuration post image install.

Is it possible to create an image on one machine, regardless of audio, video, ect drivers, which will perfectly install onto another machine?  I can currently restore any image onto any machine, but the imaged machines then require all the device drivers installing manually, and this is NOT the result i'm looking for.

Is it possible (and if so how!) to integrate the additional drivers post image creation?  Will I have to integrate the drivers onto the source machine and re-create an image?  Or am I barking up the wrong tree?

Any and all advice is more than welcomed as I have a feeling i'm going to have to become very familiar with Ghost Suite in my new job!

The operating system build process is not really Ghost dependent although Ghost does simplify some things. What you have failed to do is to tell us which O/S you are deploying, as the way that drivers are handled is simpler under Win 7 than XP, for example.

Also, are you using Sysprep?

Frankly, the quest for a single image to support any machine is a long and complex undertaking. Commercial products such as UIU provide a huge library of drivers and a methodology for building images that use the library, but my experience of this is that the library drivers tend to get out of date very fast and of course as soon as laptops get into the frame, you have a whole bunch of model specific drivers for handling functionality such as fingerprint readers that are just not present on desktop machines.

As new models come out, they use new chipsets with new drivers, so you are always going to have to locate and download the appropriate driver sets for any hardware you have not handled to date.

An XP build I worked on that supported 20 models of desktop and laptop, mostly Lenovo with a couple of HP workstations, ran to over 1Gb of drivers in the library as every model had some unique content. Building the necessary driver paths into the Sysprep inf file was also a challenge and you are limited to 4000 characters so keep paths as short as possible. With WIn 7, it now recurses through the entire folder tree of drivers so you don't need all that hassle.

Again, you will find that you need different builds for 32 bit and 64 bit machines and also another build for any tablet machines.

Another point on top of Ed's (Sysprep is unbelievably slow, but it's reliable) is that Ghost Solution Suite does have a powerful tool to integrate drivers post-image, which is called DeployAnywhere. DeployAnywhere by design only deals with mass storage and wired network drivers, because those are the critical drivers needed to ensure that an imaged machine boots and stays under the Ghost Solution Suite management console's central management, but that's also usually the most important thing as it's those drivers which tend to cause the most problems.

Pretty much the main thing to struggle with in terms of DeployAnywhere is understanding the concept of PCI Identifiers as used in Windows, getting from that to what actual device is used and therefore what driver matches the device; many manufacturers (for instance, RealTek) give their devices "family" names that don't correspond well with the specific driver you may need, especially for vendors (for instance, Dell) who sometimes integrate such devices into machines such that you need a vendor-specific driver.

So, DeployAnywhere helps when you have the right driver to ensure that it's injected into the newly-imaged system, but there's not much that Ghost can do about simplifying the awful mess vendors and manufacturers have made over the years of finding the right driver - it's up to hardware manufacturers and vendors to do the right things there, and sometimes they just don't.

Faced with the problem of finding all the right drivers when creating an image, and also knowing that the operating system supplied by the vendor usually has all the right drivers present, I wrote a little utility that gathers all the hardware plug and play IDs for the devices in the target system and also the driver information. The code is in the article here: Utility to Assist in Identifying Plug and Play Drivers Symantec Connect

Armed with the plug and play IDs for the various peripheral chipsets such as the NIC and hard disk, and an idea of what driver files are being used makes it a lot easier (in my experience) to validate the INF files from any candidate driver sets. A lot of modern hardware now comes with Win 7 preinstalled, which is then downgraded to XP, so a different set of drivers is required, but the device IDs are the same.

If all else fails, entering the PNP ID into google will often bring you to a download site which has the appropriate driver.

Hi there, thanks for all your replys.

I'm most likely to be updating Windows XP or Vista machines to Windows 7.  It also sounds like I will need to create a custom Sysprep file for each type of machine that I will be upgrading.

I've been asked to come up with a solution to the following situation:  I need to be able to roll out a full O/S upgrade remotely and seamlessly.  We want to be able to upgrade an O/S with as little disturbance to the customer as possible, so manual intervention to install device drivers is a bit of a No-No.  So far each system i've rolled out an image onto has installed Windows 7 perfectly, just without graphics, sounds, ect.. drivers.

I'm not too worried about trying to source the correct drivers as i'm pretty happy googling VEN&DEVICE_ID's to source them. 

I'm also a little unsure as to how to setup Domain information onto client machines. Quite a few of our customers have host names which use the users initials (e.g. COMPANY-JC, COMPANY-BL). Can I specify exactly which host names end up on which machines?

Cheers

Ross