I need advice on computer lab deployment of Vista/XP...

[googlegroups]

I am setting up a computer lab with 14 new Dell laptops, all identical
hardware. We need to be able to boot either Vista or XP Pro on these
laptops. We also need to have the ability to "refresh" the OS back to
a clean "image" before each new class, to eliminate any changes that
previous classes have made. We can't lock-down the OS, because many of
the classes require that students have full control of the OS and are
able to make changes.

Currently we are running only XP Pro and use Norton GoBack for this
purpose, which works pretty well. Workstations are usually refreshed
once a day, as that's how long most of our classes last. For multi-OS
configurations, in the past we used some scripts with multiple "PQ
Drive Image" images to extract a particular OS to the boot partition
on the drive. This was all done on the local disk, so there was no
network bottleneck while writing the images out. It worked very well,
so we're leaning in that direction again.

I've been reading about ImageX and other MS technologies such as
Windows Deployment Services, and I'm trying to figure out if these
would be a better solution. From the info I've given above, can anyone
tell me if these would be workable solutions in this case? I already
know how Ghost and Drive Image work and that they will work, but don't
know if I should take the time to read up on and experiment with these
other technologies if they won't work in the end.

Thanks,

Mike

 

[JRB Associates]

Mike,

Have you considered using something like Virtual PC? You can have the
Operating System of your choice for the host, and then have Virtual Machines
of Windows XP and Vista for use in the classes.

There are so many possible configurations, you would have a plethora of
choices. Everything from "undo disks" to copying a fresh VM for each class.
In the past few years, I have seen this done repeatedly for class settings
with laptops.

While I have used Drive Image (and Ghost) for many years, I have truly come
to appreciate ImageX. It is so much easier and flexible in many ways.

Best wishes,
John Baker

 

[Joe Morris]

I am setting up a computer lab with 14 new Dell laptops, all identical
hardware. We need to be able to boot either Vista or XP Pro on these
laptops. We also need to have the ability to "refresh" the OS back to
a clean "image" before each new class, to eliminate any changes that
previous classes have made. We can't lock-down the OS, because many of
the classes require that students have full control of the OS and are
able to make changes. [remainder snipped]

Have you considered using virtual machines for this? Load the (real) hosts
with Linux, install VMWare, then create a virtual machine with the
configuration you want. Create a snapshot of the configuration you want the
students to see when they arrive; at the end of the period, revert to the
snapshot.

For end-of-day resets, or if you are concerned that the students have
managed to hack into ^W^W improve the reset configuration, have a second
(perhaps hidden) partition, and restore the standard environment by deleting
the virtual machine's folder and rebuilding it by copying the files from the
second partition. A DVD copy of the sterile image could also be used.

You could also (as you noted) do a reset in a non-virtual environment using
a second partition with Ghost images from which you could lay down a new
working partition, but you wouldn't get the instantaneous revert-to-snapshot
function that VMWare offers. (The DVD approach could also be used here.)

A third option would be to invest in removable hard disk caddies. If you
get two caddies (and disks) for each station, you could swap them each
night: the one that was in the student machine would be moved to an offline
copy station where its contents are refreshed from a sterile master copy,
while the drive that was refreshed during the day is installed to become
tomorrow's student system.

Which (if any) of these fits your requirements is something only you (and
your management) can determine.

Joe Morris

 

[googlegroups]

John: I did consider using Virtual PC or something along those lines.
There are a couple of issues with using that. 1. In my experience,
there does seem to be a bit of a performance hit when running the
virtual OS, and we want these PCs to be as fast as possible. This is a
corporate training lab, BTW. 2. The workstation setup and "refresh"
processes need to be extremely simple, idiot-proof if you like. The
people that set up the lab each morning know very little about PCs,
beyond using MS Word, and can get flustered pretty easily with complex
instructions. 3. I'm not sure if you can have just the virtual OS
visible and completely hide the host OS, which is what we would need
to do. Whatever solution we use needs to be completely transparent to
the lab participants. I've just started reading up on ImageX, can it
do everything that Ghost and Drive Image can? Can you give any
specifics as to why you prefer it over the others?

Joe: Looks like great minds think alike, you and John mentioned
similar solutions. I have zero experience with Linux at this point and
would rather not throw that into the mix, although I've heard a lot of
good things about VMWare. I've got about a month to get everything
configured and ready to go, which isn't a lot of time considering
everything else I have to do here. Because these are adult students,
mostly professionals, we're not too concerned about hacking, although
my previous solution did hide both the utility and image partitions
once the OS booted. Unfortunately, it looks like our image is not
going to fit on a single DVD as there will be a couple large software
packages installed. Currently, GoBack lets us rollback the OS in about
3-5 minutes. Typically we have at least 30 minutes to set up before a
class starts, so we don't necessarily need to be able to reset
quickly, although it is nice. Extracting the Drive Image images was
very clean and reliable, but took slightly more time than using GoBack
does now. These are all laptops, so removable drives probably aren't
going to work. We also need to keep this process very simple. Right
now, it takes only 2-3 clicks to revert a PC with GoBack.

I considered making each PC dual-boot XP and Vista, with GoBack
installed within each OS independently. I'm not sure if that would
work or not, and the last time I checked GoBack was not yet available
for Vista anyway. I think we're going to lean towards keeping it very
simple. I'll have to read up more on ImageX to make sure that it can
do everything that Ghost and Drive Image do, and will probably use
that to extract the images before each class. I'll probably have to
manage the process with a very simple batch file menu, so that it's
very easy to get the lab ready in the morning.

Thanks very much guys,

Mike

 

[JRB Associates]

Mike,

ImageX and Drive Image / Ghost are similar, yet quite different. They can do
similar things, but in very different ways.

Historically, Drive Image and Ghost (shall we call them DIG? just for
laughs, and ease of typing) captured and restored hard disks by making
binary images of the disk. This was fast and easy, but somewhat lacking in
flexibility. They were able to accomodate different disks (size, etc) by
actually futzing (a highly technical term!) with the contents. Personally,
I was a long time fan of Power Quest products, such as Partition Magic; they
really worked well. On the up side of binary images, is the fact that they
can be restored on the same or another disk in an identical manner. Under
certain scenarios, this can be useful, or critical (depending). On the down
side, making changes can be difficult and time consuming. For the most part,
the only practical way to make any change to the image is to restore it to a
disk, either boot the system, or connect it to another running system, make
the changes, then recapture the image. Likewise, there is more than one way
to use DIG. Either it can be actually installed on the target system, hence
changing the target to accomodate the tool to be used, or the disk can be
removed from the target and connected to another system, which is dedicated
to imaging. Another method (non-intrusive) is to boot from a floppy and run
PQDI (PowerQuest Drive Image) that way. I never liked "polluting" (or shall
we say compromising), the target system by installing DIG on it, so I always
opted for either the "drive removal" method or the "boot floppy" method,
which leaves the target system uncorrupted by the tools used.

ImageX is similar in that it can capture disk images, but completely
different in that it does so on a file-by-file basis, not using binary
images. This has it's own up and down sides. On the down side is that it
does not represent a binary image of the disk. If needed for something (say
forensic captures) then ImageX won't work, but then again DIG would not be
used for that either. The up sides are many. Since the captured disk is
represented by individual files, it can be modified offline, without having
to apply/modify/capture an actual disk (for many things). Different disks
(size, geometry, etc) are easy to accomodate. ImageX modifys WIM files, and
there can be more than one image within a single WIM file. It is easy to
"split" a WIM file, so moving from a single DVD to multiple CDs is fairly
easy. The list goes on.

Like most things, the "devil is in the details" when it comes to what to
choose. I am curious about the performance issue you raised regarding
Virtual Machines. Whether you look at VMWare as Joe suggested, or Virtual
PC, either should be able to work, depending on the requirements. If you
need to access certain hardware devices, then either may be a problem,
VMWare does support more hardware (such as USB), but performance for either
should be OK if the hardware is fairly current. For example, I use Virtual
PC with a host running Windows XP SP2, and Vista Virtual Machines (Business,
Enterprise and Ultimate) are quite snappy. The host laptop is an IBM
(Lenovo) R60e with an Intel Centrino Duo (dual core) CPU and 2 GB RAM. I
have attended several roadshow classes sponsered by Microsoft, where the
laptops were Dell, again with 2 GB RAM, and they were also quite responsive.
I don't know your hardware, or the performance requirements, but if they
were within bounds, Virtual Machines would certainly allow for good
responsiveness, and easy configuration (Microsoft did exactly that with the
Dell laptops during their roadshows).

I hope you can find a good solution.

John Baker

 

[googlegroups]

Thanks for all the info John. I too was a huge fan of PQ products in
years past. I was sad to see them absorbed by Symantec. Drive Image
was a wonderful product that we got a lot of use out of. I too opted
for the a floppy or CD boot of DIG so as not to mess with the OS. We
still use Ghost that way here in the office to restore or roll out new
PCs. We use a boot floppy and a harddrive with images on it, works
great and is pretty fast.

Updating our lab images in the past was not a lot of fun with DI. Like
you said, we would have to load the image, make changes (Windows
updates, install software, etc.) and then save the image back out.
Because each workstation had a different computer name, we would have
to do this individually on each PC. We're sort of doing the same thing
now with Norton GoBack. I supposed even with ImageX we would have to
roll changes into each workstation image separately, because of the
differences. Speaking of binary copies, I have noticed that the
current version of the Ghost boot floppy we are using (2003) seems to
copy on a file by file basis. This seems to alleviate the problem that
DI used to have if you were extracting an image to a partition or disk
that was a different size than the source. DI has a "resize" process
that ran after the image extraction, which added more time to the
overall process.

I haven't used Virtual PC/Virtual Server much, but did install them on
some test machines a few weeks ago. The main PC I used was a P4 3.0Gz
with 1GB RAM. I didn't notice any performance problems until I tried
to play an mpg file. The video was pretty choppy, not acceptable
quality. We do sometimes have live video playing on our lab PCs, so
that may be a problem. Also, I'm worried that the set up of the
virtual PC before the class may be too much for our employees. One of
our labs is at a remote office and it's just not practical for me to
run down there all the time to help them with it. It really needs to
be very easy to set up. Even when it was easy before, we always made
sure that printed instructions were available to anyone setting up the
lab.