TechGrabage

I am a user of VMWare, a software that speaks for itself. I want to use VMWare to create my base images for various tasks and hardware platforms. Today I will test this:

1) Add a new drive to a virtual machine 2) In the guest OS, format the disk (bigger than current c: drive) 3) Fire up GHOST32.exe within the guest OS. 4) Create an image of drive C: on the newly created/formatted drive D: 5) Move the image to a network location for depployment.

Sounds like it’ll work. I’ll post some results.

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I am using the newest version of the Ghost Corporate Console of late. Works very nicely. In conjunction with Universal Imaging Utility (UIU) I can deploy a single ‘universal’ image to many different machines. Once I have this universal image created I can deploy it to many machines with just a few clicks in the Ghost Console. For each machine the console can see I can create a custom cinfig for that machine that will give it the correct computer name and join it to the domain.

You can’t beat being able to click a machine and send an image to it that will rename it and join it to the domain!

The current version of Ghost Corporate Solution Suite in conjuntion with the UIU is something no network/systems admin should have to live without.

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Attention Sys Admins and Desktop Support Specialists everywhere!

This is the tool you have been waiting for. A lot of use GHOST for our PC imaging needs. Why not use it, it mkaes life a lot easier. For years the big draw back with imaging Windows clients has been the Hardware Abstration Layer (HAL). The HAL is unique to each installation platform. It tells Windows how to communicate with the hardware inside the PC. If this layer is not configured correctly settings OS settings that pertain to hardware (audio, video…) would not work. Windows uses Plug-n-Play (PNP) to determine the contents of the HAL.

What if we could eliminate the HAL from the Ghost image? In conjuntion with SysPrep we could force the machine to create the HAL upon restoration of the image to a client machine. In steps the Universal Imaging Utility from Binary Research International. The UIU takes care of this. It even automates the SysPrep process with a few basic templates for you to use.

In my testing the UIU has been almost flawless. I have created a ‘master’ image of a Windows XP Pro installtion on an HP DX2000 mini tower machine. If you check the link you can see the specs. I have then successfully deployed this image to the following machines:

Gateway M1000 HP D220 HP NC6000 Gateway Profile 3 Gateway Profile 2

All of the above have very different HAL’s. A Ghost image created with the UIU restored to all of the machines without any issues what so ever! Using Ghost Corporate I was even able to set the computer name and join it to the domain! I was done just as easy as that. In the past I would have had to keep Ghost images around for each hardware platform. This reduces the number of images I need to keep around drastically.

The only machine I cant restored a UIU image to is a Gateway E4600. Failes on video hardware. The UIU people are working very hard with me to fix this!

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

Universal Imaging Utility