Ghost Solution Suite

Guys, I've bumped this to management who hopefully will answer this shortly. Being under Altiris now and with a new product manager, I'm not sure what the management position on this particular style of use is any more and so this has to go upstairs.

Hugo's answer wins, I'm sure :)

But a while back, I was told that I could *make* an image of as many machines as I wanted to.  But the moment I put the image onto a machine (via any Ghost method - console, manual Ghostcast server, DVD with image on it, etc) then I would have to have a license for that machine.  I don't know if that is the case any longer, or if that was wrong to begin with.

At the risk of stealing sales from Symantec, for a lot of these one-off things (I do exactly the same thing you do now), I use a freeware product DriveImage XML.  It works great, no license(s) needed, and works pretty much the same as a network Ghost boot disk (where you mount a share off some server, and then take an image of your drive and save it over there.)  You could of course, save to another hard drive attached locally or whatever.

Ghost has *always* been on a per-machine basis, as best as I can tell (from at least back in Symantec Ghost Corporate 7.)  It was just a matter of when you had to count that machine - when you took an image of it, when you put an image onto it, or both (or any other function - what if the only thing you did was Backup, or User Migrate, or whatever)?  To me, that counts too.

PH

Hugo said: "Each device imaged through the Ghost tools (console or command-line) requires a license"

"Imaged" refers to either a create or a restore operation. It has been like this for as long as Symantec has produced Ghost (since mid-1998).

So please buy the VAR license for single use scenarios - this will save you money.

had a question pertaining to license.

we use dell direct image (CFI) and they use ghost technology to make a factory image.

if we use them to take our custom image does that count for a ghost license as well?

thanks,

In general, system manufacturers which use Ghost to initially provision a machine are using a special kind of one-time-use-only Ghost license (the "VAR license" referred to by "Balrob" in the reply above). You can confirm this with your system manufacturer, but in general system manufacturers themselves have special volume licensing arrangements with Symantec for manufacturing using Ghost and they would deploy your custom image under the terms of that.

As such, the manufacturer's use of Ghost to deploy your custom image would not normally affect you beyond your licensed use of Ghost to make the master image for the manufacturer to use initially. Of course, these one-time-only licenses used by the manufacturer do not carry over to you; once you have received the factory machine, if you subsequently deploy a different image to it using Ghost then you will need to have your own license for every machine you do that to, either a one-time-use VAR license or a normal multi-use license such as those sold through the Symantec online store.