RIS vs GHOST

[WP]

Can anyone tell me or point me in a direction where I may
find info about the advantages and disadvantages of RIS
over GHOST. Ghost will cost our hospital 5000 dollars to
implement, whereas RIS is part of our pre-existing servers
and shouldnt cost anything.

 

[Adam Leinss]

Can anyone tell me or point me in a direction where I may
find info about the advantages and disadvantages of RIS
over GHOST. Ghost will cost our hospital 5000 dollars to
implement, whereas RIS is part of our pre-existing servers
and shouldnt cost anything.

RIS only runs on a Windows 2000 server or later running Active
Directory, a DNS service and a DHCP service must exist somewhere on the
network as well. If you want to use the PXE feature, all of the NICs
in each of your PCs must support it. Otherwise, you will have to use a
floppy disk in each PC. RIS can only image the C: drive, so if you
have other partitions it won't do those. You must also setup the image
correctly so the NIC drivers are installed in the OEM directory
structure or RIS will refuse to push down the image.

Adam

 

[Brendon Rogers]

We used Ghost to rollout our NT4 PC's and it worked very well, however we
have given up on Ghost and gone for RIS for our W2K rollout.

As long as your machines have PXE-compliant Network cards then RIS is
great - we don't have to configure and maintain multiple Ghost images for
multiple hardware platforms because RIS is essentially a fresh install each
time.

We decided not to use the RIPREP method, but rather use GPO to deploy
applications to our RIS'd machines.

For us to produce a fully functional machine (Office XP, IE6Sp1, inhouse
applications, anti-virus, Media Player etc etc) takes about an hour per
machine. So this is 4 times longer than Ghost but the flexibility is worth
it.

 

[Oli Restorick [MVP]]

In my opinion, you need to use a scripted build if you're going to use Ghost
anyway.

If you don't when a new machine with new hardware comes along, or a new
application, you have to go right back to square one and recreate the image
according to your "book" method of performing a build. When that's not
documented properly, individual preferences of the tech who prepares the
build start to creep in and you're back to suqare one.

Deployment techniques are there for two reasons:
1) To speed deployment
2) To ensure a reasonable level of consistency between machines

Without having a scripted build, you have no 100% accurate record of how
your build is actually created.

Regards

Oli