Ghost Solution Suite

We want to establish the best practice regarding deploying Ghost Solution Suite across multiple locations with relatively slow network links between them.

Lets say that you have a corporate office that has computers to image locally but is also responsible for imaging computers at several remote sites.  These remote sites have links that are adequate for management traffic, but would not be optimal for streaming entire system image files across.  

You have the server, database, and file shares with all of your image files located in the corporate office.  What is the best way to have duplicate copies of the image files local at the sites so that you can initiate the image process for all the sites from a central console, but specify that the image for each system will come from a local storage repository or ghost server.  

1. Is this possible?  If so, is there a doc anywhere on how to configure it this way?

2. If it is possible, does it include an automated function to deliver the image file 1 time when it is created to the remote sites, or would you have to manually copy the image file to each of these servers or set up some sort of file synchronization tool?

Thanks very much in advance for your insight.

We are wondering the same thing.  I found out you can do a component install on an additional location server, but how do we configure, maintain, direct installs, etc.

I'll preface this with I haven't used GSS in 5 years since 2.5 was out so take this with a grain of salt. 

Honestly the product doesn't have a good way to handle that, and the correct soltuion lies in the number of remote clients & frequency of imaging clients at the remote sites. If it's a one-time thing, then I think you're better off transering the image *once* and using a local PXE server + ghost boot images to take care of your clients. Otherwise you'll be sending a large (probably multi-GB) image over the WAN w/ each image. 

That said, I haven't seen 3.0 and don't know if it has the capabilities to handle such a setup natively.

Good luck with your project.

As mrguitar suggested we use local PXE servers and local image repositories (file shares) at each remote site.  Images rarely cross the WAN.  Works fine for us. 

This is certainly possible. Take a look at this article for a detailed explaination on how this can be done,

http://www.symantec.com/connect/articles/WAN-Nirvana-Deployment-Server-6x

It was written for Altiris DS6.9, but this applies equally to GSS3.0