Ghost Solution Suite

I've used GSS successfully for a few years now to remotely push and pull images to a couple groups of PCs I administer.  Now I'm starting to think more ambitiously about how I could possible replace DeepFreeze (which resets the PCs to a default image at each reboot) with Ghost.  I could use a reality check...

It should be easy to setup scheduled tasks to ghost each group to a standard image first thing in the morning.  I might even try saving the images locally, to speed this step up, though I haven't tried that yet.  Here's where I start to get excited--could I take an image captured by Ghost, load it with VMWare (or the like), run updates and such, then push the updated image back out to the physical PCs?  That would be a massive timesaver.  I've done a bit of research, and it sounds as though loading an image with VMWare is pretty straightforward.  Not sure about the rest of it though--will changes made in the virtual environment "stick" to the ghost image?  Do I need to reconvert back to a physical image first, somehow?

Thanks,
Mike

You will need to confirt the .gho to a vmdk and then go back to a ghost image.   If you use the console then you could just set up a vmware as a host and ghost cast your image back or follow this link, and then just treat it like a regular worstation.     Do your updates and then take a new image using the console or mount a ghost boot ISO,  USB boot won't work but the ISO boot is fast.


http://service1.symantec.com/support/on-technology.nsf/docid/2008061815540460

cheers.

OK, that makes sense, thanks.

Just remember, the VMWare machine is going to be different "hardware", and you would need to either use Microsoft Sysprep when creating the new image or DeployAnywhere when restoring it.

Thank you,

Randy

The use of virtual machines is getting so commonplace nowadays that I would encourage all build engineers to include VMWare as a supported "hardware" platform in their build processes from day 1.
That will make life so much easier for support teams and for application packagers as real examples of builds can be used for packaging and for general deployment testing without having to have banks of physical hardware cluttering up the lab.

Ooooooo, that's unfortunate.  So the process would be: run sysprep on client--pull image from client--convert img to virtual format--load vm--make changes--run sysprep on vm--pull image from vm--push image to group of clients?  Might not net much time-savings for me.  How involved is running Sysprep,? I've never had to go through that before.

while using sysprep is not hard it does basically wipe out all of the custom settings of a machine including SID and comptuer name, this stuff can be put back using ghost client and console but i think its more trouble than its worth to do on a regular basis.  not to mention you will be stressing those hard drives pretty bad imaging them every day 

you might want to look into using a group policy and or manditory profiles instead.  Imaging is great but its sort of like droping a nuke on an anthill, there are a few more gracefull ways to get around your problem.

Good points.  I guess I'll give up the dream.  We can't do much with group policy as we don't have a domain server but keep things under control with Fortres and Deepfreeze.  I was just hoping to get out from under all these subscription costs and go all in with Ghost.  Oh well.  Thanks for all the replies everyone.

group policies and mandatory profiles can be done locally and easily deployed as part of your system image.  I manage some PC's that are in a (technologically speaking )high security prison so they have no network connection, i implemented the aforementioned strategies on the jail image and was able to protect them better than deep freeze ever did.

Oh?  I've used GPedit for some basic lockdowns, like denying access to IE's control panel and altering the desktop image, but that's it.  Could you provide a bit more detail about how you lock down your machines?  We could take this conversation elsewhere if we're drifting too far OT...

PM sent, sounds like an offline conversation