Imaging with Altiris Deployment Solution 6.9 has made the job of imaging workstations and servers so much easier than ever before. Before the merger of Altiris and Symantec you only had the option of using RDeploy within the Altiris Deployment Console as an imaging engine and with Symantec you only had Symantec Ghost Imaging Solution and with Microsoft Windows, well I guess they were always there with their Deployment Solution.
Now a days you have the luxury of choosing which one of the three to use when creating or deploying an image, in a way they all have the same end result, but work slightly different in the way they capture the images, read partitions, etc.
What I want to do is take you through these 3 imaging engines, how they work and what the different functions each of them bring to the table. We will start of by talking about RDeploy then move on to Microsoft ImageX and lastly Symantec Ghost.
RDeploy
RapiDeploy is an imaging product that uses network multicasting technology to deploy full hard disk images to target client computers, ranging from one to several hundred computers simultaneously. Images are usually created from a source computer which contains the operating system, software applications, custom software application, Microsoft patches and hot fixes / service packs and drivers. All the things that might take you hours to do during manually installation of computers. These images are then captured and stored either on a different partition or on a server file share.
Some Benefits of RDeploy:
Create Images: RapiDeploy creates a single image file containing all information from a hard disk partition, a group of partitions, or an entire hard disk. Image files are saved on a file server (or network share) for later use, the images are saved with either the .img or .exe file extensions.
Note:
RDeploy copies real data file by file, resulting in a clean, defragmented image that can be resized and restored to a disk of a different size. Partitions can be resized before deployment of the images as well.
Create Self-Executing Image Files: When you create an image file, you can save it as either a regular image file (*.img) or an executable file (*.exe). Executable image files are useful for configuring computers that are not connected to the network.
Ever thought of doing a Hardware Independent Image from a DVD instead of your server file share? Where all drivers and files are referenced from the DVD, with a customized script.
Deploy Images to One or More Computers: You can deploy an image to one computer or use network multicasting to send an image file to multiple computers simultaneously. You can deploy an image file that has been saved or you can send an image directly from a computer being imaged.
This is normally done when the one computer functions as the master computer and instead of getting the image from the server it receives the image directly from the source or master computer.
Span Media: RDeploy lets you "span media" or store images across multiple media. For example, you can "split" an image into several files and store them across several CD-RWs, DVDs, or other removable media (flash drives). You can save the image file directly to removable media, or you can save all of the split image files to a file server directory and then transfer them to the media later.
This option is handy when it comes to imaging stand alone computers that are not connected to the network. Usually spans 2 or 3 DVDs or can fit onto a bootable flash drive (now a days they are 32GB in size).
NOTE: Maximum size that an image can be spanned is 2040MB or 2GB.
Now that we know more about the benefits and features that RDeploy has to offer, here are more details on how it works and functions:
RDeploy can be run in one of two ways:
- Using program wizards
- Running from the command-line with switches
FAT and NTFS partitions are imaged, reading file by file, where other formats are read and imaged sector by sector, making it impossible to resized during distribution of the image.
By default your Bootworks partitions and your OEM partitions will not be overwritten unless specified with a command line switch to do so.
Intro to Multicasting
The multicast transmission is synchronized by the Master PC, so it will only go as fast as the slowest computer in the group. If a single computer fails, it will drop out of the session and the session will continue. You can usually multicast only to computers on the same network segment because most routers and switches do not allow multicasting. To image computers on another segment, start a MasterPC on that segment and connect the Client PCs to the Master PC.
Deployment Solution 6.9: Different Imaging Engines (ImageX)