Deployment Solution

Know of any links, kb, how-to, examples, on deploying an image to computers in a classroom?

Trying to minimize touching every PC ...

Situation:
- PCs are same model, maybe one or two are different; so we're okay using one image
- Need to make sure drivers install successfully on all PCs
- May have to install some apps on the fly; instead of part of image
- Need to add PCs to corporate domain
- Need to add Domain Users to Local Admin (or Power Users) group
- Need to copy over files from network share to PCs

Those are just starters, so if you have real-world scenario or know where I can get some really good info, would love to hear.


Thanks!

I too am interested in this.  I would like to be able to do mass redeploy of images to public locations every night or even through out the day.  We are a library and need to have everything set back every time someone logs off.  We use clean slate, but find it hampers us more than we would like it too.  We would like to be able to use Altiris in some way.

Open for suggestions!

Shame this question didn't get a decent answer the first time round!

For classroom/public area where regular reimaging is  required, one of the most efficient solutions is to store the images on each computer's local disk with hidden bootworks.

http://www.symantec.com/connect/articles/chapter-7-hidden-bootworks

This provides the fastest PC rebuild times, and has the advantage that your network bandwidth isn't slaughtered during the imaging process. In answer to the original poster's questions,

1. Altiris can automatically join machines to the domain natively, or if you images are sysprep'd you can enter the domain join details directly into the sysprep.inf
2. You can add an extra task to your job to copy over files to the PC, or install additional software
3. Checking drivers are installed is tricky. If you don't use Sysprep you just have to be sure that all your drivers are present in the current image. This  normally means creating the image on one computer, transferring it to the other and then re-installing the missing drivers. After taking the image of the second machine, the image should deploy well onto both models.

However, for scenario's where you want to reimage computers and awful lot, its sometimes best not to reimage. Try looking into other products to reset the computer to a predefined state (such as DeepFreeze), or which scrub the public user profiles. These products, in conjunction with Altiris can give you better control of public access PCs  and ensure the minimum of downtime.

Kind Regards,
Ian./