In our organization we have a few workstations, powerful ones, attached to high speed scanners. Their purpose is to scan thousands of pages of information on an almost daily basis, process them, and upload them to a database. The software that manages all this is custom in-house. Due to the frequency of changes to the program and the need for the workstations to have high availability, we decided to start imaging them regularly. I was given this project and decided that Altiris Deployment Solution would be the best choice to handle regular image creations and, if necessary, image restoration. We had Altiris DS 6.8 already in place to manage images for some of our servers and all of our thin clients. I had very little experience using Altiris so I was hoping everything would be fairly straight forward.
The first thing I did was use Altiris to remotely install the client on the scanning workstations. That worked just as expected. Altiris then discovered the clients and cataloged them. Now I had to decide how I wanted to work with the clients. Did I want to install a managed partition or use PXE? We already had the Altiris PXE services running to handle the servers and thin clients. I decided I would use PXE to handle the scanning workstations as well. What I found was the workstations would boot, attach to PXE, and then cycle in an infinite loop. Altiris would say it was updating records and reboot the workstation. Then it would start all over again. I worked with the PXE Configuration utility for a couple days but it just wasn’t playing nice. So I decided to just upgrade Altiris to 6.9. Once I got 6.9 up and running PXE booting smoothed out. I also had to change the PXE Configuration utility to make Next Device the primary selection on the Boot Menu, and Altiris PXE Boot the default boot option on the DS tab. So, at this point, if a workstation PXE booted, and Altiris didn’t have a job for it, it would just exit PXE and go straight to Windows. If Altiris did have a job waiting, it would run it immediately against that workstation. Now that I was able to make the workstations communicate with Altiris through PXE, I moved on to smoothing out the problems with the backup jobs.
I created a backup job for each workstation. The experience was straight forward, no hiccups. I decided I would start with RDeploy because I had seen that used before. However RDeploy did not like the scanning workstations. Each scanning workstation ran off 2 striped SATA drives. RDeploy kept throwing different errors at me. Sometimes it would complain that it couldn’t recognize the partition. Other times it would progress to almost 30% and then say it couldn’t read the volume. So I decided to abandon RDeploy and move on to ImageX. This required that the PXE Configuration utility be updated to add a WinPE boot image. I had to download and install the latest version of WAIK on the Altiris server. After that, however, Altiris handled all of the boot image creation with little input from me. Once I had a WinPE boot image and had updated the backup jobs to use ImageX and WinPE, they booted into PXE, which sent them to WinPE, and created their images with no issues.
However one of the workstations started having problems. It would boot into PXE but Altiris was acting like it had no job waiting, and would release it to boot into Windows. I tried recreating the jobs, removing the client from Altiris and letting it rediscover, nothing helped. I didn’t want to pay a bunch of money for live tech support so I almost gave up on Altiris.
I then decided to look at Acronis since they offer live backup services. I downloaded the client and installed it on the 3 machines. To manage it I had to use Acronis’ management utility. When I installed and attempted to use it I couldn’t find the management toolbar. As it turns out I had to, through their management utility, connect to my own machine, so I could access the management packs I had already installed locally. After I overcame that hurdle I now had access to the clients. However I was shocked at the rudimentary quality of this management software. First off I had limited status checking (it would only update every 30 seconds or so). Also I couldn’t right click on any of the clients to get properties or other information. I could select a client and then some information on that client would appear on the side of the window. My only right click options were to select one or select all. I also couldn’t easily organize them. If I wanted to get more information on a machine I had to connect to that machine. Then I would have to reconnect to my machine to access the management tools. Also, if I scheduled a job on the client it wouldn’t allow me to specify credentials, in order to backup to a network location that wasn’t open to everyone. I had to do that through the management tools. However if I wanted to make a change to the job I’d have to go back to the client and I’d get errors that it couldn’t access the backup destination because it didn’t have the credentials, which I couldn’t add from the client! I could not believe that Acronis was publishing management software like this. I wouldn’t even call it Power User software. It’s like it was designed for an absolute home user. The difference in usability between Acronis’ management tools and Altiris’ management tools was staggering. At that point I decided that I’d much rather fix the problem with Altiris, and gain back the level of management that I needed, than limp along with Acronis’ offering.
Still not wanting to pay for support, I decided I’d try the Symantec hosted Altiris forums. After I registered and posted my problem it was solved within just a couple days. All I had to do was remove the malfunctioning client from Altiris, reboot the server, allow the client to be rediscovered, and that’s it. Now Altiris was working beautifully. I scheduled each job to happen on the first of the month and then every 30 days thereafter.
So now I have these backup images but need to be able to redeploy them if the striped volume crashes or if the workstation dies. As a test I decided I’d try to redeploy one of the WIMs I’d just created. So I created another set of jobs to distribute a disk image. After pointing each job to a corresponding WIM I hesitated. From previous experience I knew ImageX can and does apply an image over any existing data a drive. So I added a scripted task to run the Altiris wipe utility before the machine booted into WinPE. However I soon found that was unnecessary because Altiris, by default, recognized that since I was distributing a disk image, the drive would first need to be wiped. So when it booted into WinPE I watched as it ran diskpart, again by default, to clean and prep the drive before it ran ImageX. That is the kind of automation I’m looking for!
I now have a fully functioning light touch, scheduled, image creation and image deployment process for our scanning workstations. Seeing how much I’ve learned, combined with how easy Altiris DS is to use, I’m confident Altiris will be seeing an expanded role in our workstation deployments.