Desktop deployment

[GERRYNICOL]

We have a small network set up at our office. There are various cabins and sub sections. Each cabin consist of a full suite of workstation. These are identical within their room. The type of workstation is not same in all the rooms.

So the basis of my question is, for creating and deploying images to different cabins and sub sections, what would be the best solution? Reimaging of the workstation should be possible on the fly with my OS and all other applications used when necessary. I know that RIS alone cannot solve this so therefore am keen to know the proper solution.

[Steve123]

I had used Ghost for such applications and it works fine. If the devices are hardware specific it would work great better than RIS.

[Milton.J]

I like BDD to use for this application more than the Ghost. I do use ghost but its good for only hardware dependent builds. For hardware flexibility and group installations, BDD is better than both RIS and Ghost.

Besides useful for non-hardware specific installation, BDD has additional functionality that are not included in RIS. Like builds based on MAC address, chasis serial no., and several other options.

[Spyrus]

BDD is also great to refresh systems that are on a specific subnet. Its also nice because you dont have to rebuild images from scratch as in the case of Ghost. Instead you can change the build in the workbench and you are done. Though the image viewer in Ghost allows for some build modification.

[Snake08]

We use BDD servers for various applications requiring SQL server, Terminal server and File server all be built. A fully unattended build can de done off a single media set. Or we can simply download the images off the share. I prefer to have local media set which can also be a USB key. This is because it uses WinPE. Moreover, for USB key to be bootable, no specific configuration is required. RIS is still a better tool but with BDD and WSD (in server 2008), RIS is being around replace.

[Shen]

One of the software is ACK than will be helpful for OS deployment and wipe-disk.
ACMP is other application that will be useful for client management, software distribution, inventory and much more.