Ghost Solution Suite

I am about to purchase Ghost Solution Suite for my mid-size company.  Basically I need it to complete the following abilities:

1.) Create images on a NAS from a client station (can use a CD to boot)

2.) Retrieve image from a NAS on a bare metal client

3.) No licenses other than the initial license is preferred

If someone can help me out with the following questions I had from my trial period, that would be amazing.

1.) Is there any way to have the image created in one file?  It is currently separating the image into blocks of 2 GB each.

                  For boot disc I used the following:

                              Windows PE

                              Standard Ghost Boot Disc

                              Ghost32.exe

2.) Is there any way to increase the deployment speed?  It took 25 minutes to create a 13 GB image. 

                How would I start to troubleshoot if the problem is hard drive bottleneck, network bottleneck, or a limitation of Symantec software?

3.) When we purchase the full product, will there be any licensing involved with each image we create and distribute?  We will likely only use this product for the Ghost MultiCast Server.

Thanks anyone that can answer one or all of those questions.

The licensing of Ghost Solution Suite has always been on the basis of one license per machine imaged.

There is no "per image created" license, as the licensing is strictly per machine at the point of deployment.

If you are using Ghost to deploy images to retail machines in a production capacity, no doubt a specific license can be negotiated with Symantec sales for this purpose - that is outside the scope of this forum to advise on further so you would need to speak to sales.

Ghost.exe has a range of command line options you can use, which should be covered in the documentation. If I recall correctly, the switch you need is -split=0 but I'm sure someone else will correct me if my memory is faulty.

Due to the lack of support in PCDOS for modern hardware such as SATA, I would strongly recommend adopting WinPE as the standard boot engine for all your imaging requirements, as it is easy, using Ghost Boot Wizard, to add and select the appropriate Vista 32 bit drivers (as required by WinPE V2) for your NIC and SATA chipsets.

25 minutes for 13 Gb is not too shabby - you don't provide any information on the LAN speed you are using, or whether you are using any compression in the images, but basically, the faster your processor runs, the faster the Ghost code will run. Both hard disk systems and network systems can create bottlenecks, as can a DOS boot environment without SmartDrv to do some caching for you.

Try imaging a system with a solid state drive and see if it goes any faster. If it does not, then there is a good chance that your network is the bottleneck.

Your memory is correct as to the option, but it's worth bearing in mind that non-split images are in fact the default now and have been for many years. The fundamental problem is whether Ghost can determine that they are actually supported or not, especially on network media or when using MS-DOS. In the vast majority of cases where Ghost does create 2Gb splits, it's done so for the reason that it's not sure that the support for large files is really there or not. A surprisingly large number of NAS devices have traditionally not worked reliably with 64-bit file sharing for various reasons.

25 minutes for 13 Gb is not too shabby

Ghost tends to use Mbyte/min for reported speeds, so ~500Mbyte/min. That's on the low side but poor speeds are usual for NAS storage, which on consumer-grade equipment tends to be very weak anyway (low-performance disks, low-performance embedded CPUs, running one of the least suitable network protocols for the purpose).

The only suspicious thing about that number is that it's close to being about what a 100Mbps Ethernet link would deliver, so it's always possible there's a link speed negotiation problem.