Hi, 

What preOS do you use when actually ghosting VMs? Probably you would get better performance if you WinPE. The problem with booting to DOS is, vm seems to be consuming almost half of the CPU time even when not doing anything. It is much less when boot to WinPE. 

To answer your other questions, 

1. You may try WinPE (if you are not already usiing it). 

2. Actaully, Ghost32 can take images of snapshots up to an certain extend. If you look at the .vmsd file in vmware, you can find out the .vmdk file for the snapshot. (the .vmx file contains the running version of vmdk). If you use the .vmdk file for a particular snapshot, it will create a image of the snapshot. This is a boundary line feature, so you may need to play around a little bit (I don't know if older versions of vmsd has the same structure). 

3. Leave for the others to comment :-) 

4. If you have boot the machine to VP at least once using Console, you can execute 'ngctw32 -recovery' to go to VP. Since there is no Console support, client cannot boot to WinPE unless the files are already present in the machine.  

But probably the better option is to create a 'One Click VP' from Ghost Boot Wizard. You can boot any machine to VP (even if the client is not installed) just by executing the package.

Hope this helps. 

Krish 

Krish, you're a genious! Tell your boss I said you get a raise and go ahead and take the rest of the day off!

I'm going to paly around w/ WinPE more. I've used both DOS & WinPE from the VP & PXE environment w/ mixed results. If I remember properly when PXE booting to WinPE, the client wouldn't connect to the session. I'll investigate that further. I don't remember the exact error code. (I kind-of thought it was the old wattcp.cfg thing, but I was thinking that only applied to DOS). I'll try it again probably on Monday and let you know what's really happening. 

About the snapshot thing, I think VMware uses the original vmdk and creates a new "delta" file that's a vmsn for snapshots. To my understanding it works just like LVM snapshots. I need to convert both the vmdk + vmsn w/ ghost32. I can't figure out how to pass along both the vmdk + vmsn via the commandline. But I'm also using vmware server. Maybe workstation works differently w/ snapshots. ....I could be wrong about how this works.

I've never played w/ the one-click VP...... but that's definatley getting scripted into my automated ISOs. Thanks for the tip. ...ngctw32 -recovery is also greatness.

Thanks!

I keep telling that all the time :-) 

Regarding the snapshot, yes, it creates a delta and refers back to the base image. Since a link to the base image is available in delta, Ghost should be able to find it - at least this is the situation with workstation. You just specify the vmdk file name of the snapshot.

Krish 

This is what I did before GSS2.5 and the capability to use vmdks. Just as you found out the imaging in and out of VMware sessions can be slow, using networking, even when ghost and VMware are on the same machine. I have VMware installed on my ghost console. So I created a "raw" disk in VMware that is the same location where I store my ghost images (not the O/S disk). Then in ghost I captured/restored using local disk instead of VMware networking. My performance went from 50MB/s to 900MB/s.

Hope this helps