Ghost Solution Suite

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  • 1.  Simultaneous Imaging?

    Posted May 02, 2007 11:46 AM
    Greetings,

    This might be the stupidest question anyone ever asked on these boards, but I'm not sure so I'm asking.  :)

    Is it possible to image several systems at once?  If so, are there any stipulations or best practices for doing so?

    Cheers, Jack


  • 2.  RE: Simultaneous Imaging?

    Posted May 02, 2007 12:33 PM
    If you are imaging machines where the image is stored on the clients own hard drive, then there should be no limits at all.  I have run dozens of clone commands simultaniously with that kind of config.  I do not know of any for ghostcasting but I wouldnt recommend going nuts and running 10 ghostcast sessions on the same server at the same time.  I think 3 is about the limit I have done but my images are in the 15 - 20GB range and take about 30 minutes when I just have one running.


  • 3.  RE: Simultaneous Imaging?

    Posted May 02, 2007 01:38 PM
    Thanks for the reply, David. 

    What I was planning on doing was to setup several (perhaps 5) New Image Tasks to run simultaneously.  We store our images on the Ghost Server itself in a gigantic RAID array, not on the local machines, so I wonder if there would be any implications of that?

    Also, we are only imaging the partitions with the OS on them, and those range between 2-6GBs.  Our application data is all stored on separate RAID arrays on each server, which we do not image. 

    Does this sort of operation sound possible?

    Thanks again for the help!

    Cheers, Jack


  • 4.  RE: Simultaneous Imaging?

    Posted May 02, 2007 02:50 PM
    I dont see why not to be honest.  The only real issue is network bandwidth and server load.  It might be wiser to schedule them say 1.5 to 2 hours apart so that if something happens and  lags all 5 sessions at once, now you have 5 unuseable machines come morning because ghost is still running rather than 1 machine that might still be running.  Unfortunately, without some kind of custom coding I do not know of a way to make ghost wait till the last session is done before starting the next :(
     
    The above is speaking from experience ;)  one pissed off person is easier to deal with than 5 :D

    Message Edited by David.Poprik on 05-02-200711:50 AM



  • 5.  RE: Simultaneous Imaging?

    Posted May 02, 2007 03:57 PM
    Good point on the failure rates.  I think I'm going to just try it and see what happens.  I'll be sure to post my results.

    The main issue that I'm running into is that I need to get several servers imaged, but they have to be imaged overnight so I'm trying to do this as efficiently as possible.  From a bandwidth standpoint, I could care less how much is being used internally overnight since no one is working at that time, anyway.  On top of that, our internal network is 100% gigabit so that shouldn't be an issue.

    The server that the Ghost Console is running on has 4GBs of RAM and a new Xeon dual core 2.0GHz, so I think it should be able to handle the job(s) pretty well.  At least, I'd like to hope so.  ;)  The server also doesn't do anything else but Ghost and network monitoring so it will have close to 100% of its resources available.

    Thanks for the guidance, David.

    Cheers, Jack

    Message Edited by Jack Dorsey on 05-02-200712:58 PM



  • 6.  RE: Simultaneous Imaging?

    Posted May 02, 2007 04:04 PM
    Good luck, Im sure the hardware can handle it.  The only variable is unknown networking issues that arrise with the network equipment ... and I have seen lots :(