In today's fast-paced business world, many IT managers find themselves in charge of a variety of computer systems in heterogeneous environments.  And for each system they manage, they have to maintain an up-to-date image specific to that system.  Even computers built by the same manufacturer may have different operating systems, different sets of drivers, or slightly different hardware or software configurations.  If you're managing dozens or perhaps hundreds of systems, the resulting tangle of images can be daunting to manage and keep up to date.  How can you maintain all of these images without losing track?  DeployAnywhere can help.

Hardware differences needn't hold up deployment
With the DeployAnywhere technology in Symantec Ghost Solution Suite 2.5, you can produce just one image that you can use to deploy any system in your network, regardless of its hardware.  When you use that image to clone any machine, the software automatically analyzes the system, inserts the drivers required for that hardware configuration, and tweaks the operating system registry to point to those drivers. To invoke DeployAnywhere, just check the box on the management console screen, shown in the screen shot below.

The most common culprits for boot-up errors are incompatibilities between hardware and the drivers required to run it, such as drivers for the hardware abstraction layer (HAL), network interface controller (NIC), and mass storage devices.  DeployAnywhere circumvents the likelihood of such incompatibilities by identifying the drivers required for the hardware and then retrieving those drivers from whatever location you specify.  That location is usually a file repository on a CD, a shared network drive, or the same machine where the Ghost console is running.  The software provides an extensive group of the most common drivers required for most systems, but you can locate other drivers you may need and add them to the repository.

Previous attempts at hardware-independent imaging fell short because they required labor-intensive tasks such as matching drivers, using Microsoft's sysprep and updating, and sometimes scripting.  DeployAnywhere automates most of the detection and matching required for hardware-independent imaging, and it locates the right place to inject a driver into an image so it can be done automatically.  All you have to do is gather up all the drivers you need for all of your systems and put them in one central location, as shown in the screen shot below.

Fresh and hot, all in one place
DeployAnywhere helps limit the number of images you have to manage, but you still have to keep them up to date and current with all patches and updates.  Ghost Solution Suite uses hot imaging technology to keep images fresh by creating base images from a live system, ensuring that the most up-to-date image is always available for deployment.  (For more information about hot imaging, click here.)

Ghost Solution Suite's centralized management console further simplifies the control of images and migration tasks.  The console provides options for enabling DeployAnywhere, scheduling deployments, updating base images, and other activities you may need to perform on a network node.  The centralized location makes it easy to automatically and seamlessly manage all migration tasks across a network.  

Whether you're responsible for managing five systems or 500, the tasks involved in maintaining up-to-date images can be challenging without a comprehensive solution that simplifies image management, streamlines deployments and migrations, and helps limit the number of images you need to keep up to date.  Ghost Solution Suite provides all of those benefits and more. 

To learn more about Symantec Ghost Solution Suite, click here.