Ghost Solution Suite

Hey Folks,

I may be coming from a somewhat outdated approach, but I'm looking to help inform myself of what I can't seem to find on the interwebs. I use Ghost64.exe from within WinPE_x64 to pull a 40gb -Z1 image over the wire. It is taking about 8-10mins to complete, and I am trying shave that time down to about 4 or 5 minutes. I feel like Ghost is holding me back, the Transfer Speed flattens out at around 3900-4100 MB/MIN. Does anyone know what the absolute Max MB/MIN Ghost will do?

If I put the Server and the Client on a "dumb" switch and assign 192.x.x.x addresses I can get the image to go at around 5122 MB/MIN.

According to calculations we should be able to obtain 8000 MB/MIN. Has anyone really seen this kind of speed with Ghost from WinPE. I can't seem to find the limiting factor.

Thanks for listening and responding

Try doing a file copy task from win pe to copy the ghost files to the local c drive.    I don't that this isn't a image deployment but would give you a feel for how fast can X ammount of data make it from the server to the client while in PE. 

Map a drive to the server say.   I:  and then while in the folder for the ghost image do a copy *.* c:\ 

Would help with getting you the minimum time to shoot for.   Also might try with a higher compression on the image so that it will be smaller yet.   The cpu on these new systems shouldn't be the slow point any more so higher compression other than a higher opportunity for corruption should not be holding back performance the way it used to on slow cpus

Also is your PE and server  NIC driver the most recent?     And is your PE connection set at 100m or 1g?    I know the desire would be gig but what does the switch indicate is it actually connecting at gig speeds while in PE.    In the DOS days you could configure the driver to connect at differnt speeds I am sure PE is the same but I hadn't actually looked for it.   

Is the speed measured at the client or at the ghost cast server?  Not that it matters to me but keep your measurement consistant because the ghost cast server will be data sent across the wire and the client will report data written to the drive so the two speeds don't match up.   so as long as you keep your measures ment in the same place you will be good. 

As for speeds my stuff is virtualized now and that takes a hit on performance so I know I am not as fast as I could be.   

Hope those are some helpful thoughts.   Especially the copy test  I like that one to see what the best case times are.