anyone use acronis

[McBunny]

especially the true image echo enterprise software ?

how do you find it ? any intresting features or issues you have had with it ?

 

[sh33n]

I've never used it at an Enterprise level but have found it very very useful and superior to ghost these days.

Think our IT chaps are migrating all of their current ghost operations to it soon.

 

[McBunny]

yeah it does seem very good so far but its not cheap
just downloading my licensed copy now

 

[sh33n]

yeah it does seem very good so far but its not cheap
just downloading my licensed copy now

The good stuff isn't

I was doing an evaluation of Double Take the other week, thought yes this is spot on but was shocked by the price.

Still bought it though

 

[McBunny]

hehe
if your intrested in double take look at

http://www.datacore.com/

 

[Daz]

DoubleTake is very good.. but it's very expensive too.
We have some installs of it now, and it works perfectly if you're willing to invest in the initial cost.

 

[David]

we're using snap deploy v3 @ corporate level, good bit of kit. Easy to setup too. worked out at about £5 per image though...

 

[Mike_182]

We use Thin Clients which come with free Altiris licences

As for laptops/desktops/servers myself and my boss aren't fans of imaging - we prefer fresh builds. As such we(I) use nLite to make silent install CDs with all the drivers on...

 

[McBunny]

We use Thin Clients which come with free Altiris licences

As for laptops/desktops/servers myself and my boss aren't fans of imaging - we prefer fresh builds. As such we(I) use nLite to make silent install CDs with all the drivers on...

do you have a team of more than one person ?

 

[David]

imaging is sooo much easier and does the same thing, can't understand the point in fresh builds...unless it's your own pc ;] users get what they're given!

 

[ChrisR]

Place I'm at now badly needs a proper imaging solution, they've got some lash up of Ghost now which does the job and it good for rebuilding at the users desktop but little else.

I've always used Ghost Enterprise/Solution suite and I know another guy here is pushing for Altiris, but what do people here recommend, Acronis and doubletake?

Just finished updating the images today for the desktop team

As for laptops/desktops/servers myself and my boss aren't fans of imaging - we prefer fresh builds. As such we(I) use nLite to make silent install CDs with all the drivers on...

What happens if/when you need to build 100 machines? Or do one that's at another office? All a user has to do at ourplace to get their machine rebuilt is hit F12 on bootup and the system does the rest and automatically sticks the right image on. Less than 10 minutes and they are back up and running with a base build. Doubt I'd have even got from my desk to my car in that time if I had to go visit site

I like images as they are consistant, 1 image for 1 machine type, you know noone is going to stuff it up by doing something stupid.

 

[bmh.01]

I've used it but not for anything major or complicated, just for taking and restoring full images of servers worked spot on for me.

 

[Mike_182]

It's what documentation is for. All of our applications are delivered through Citrix so for Thin Clients the build process takes 5 minutes. If/When we need to build 100 machines, our WAN links vary between 256Kb and 2Mb, which you couldn't deploy an image down - not without pissing everyone else off!

 

[ChrisR]

It's what documentation is for. All of our applications are delivered through Citrix so for Thin Clients the build process takes 5 minutes. If/When we need to build 100 machines, our WAN links vary between 256Kb and 2Mb, which you couldn't deploy an image down - not without pissing everyone else off!

Yeah you wouldn't bother for thin clients, and for remote sites we just have one of the servers at that site setup to do the images, the machines connect to their site's server.

 

[dk]

we use ghost for desktop imaging and altiris (well HP RDP) for the server deployment, have a redhat image prebuilt and can have the blade server up and running within 10 mins of it arriving through the door, love it.

Just been implementing 18 blades for a customer and he had some windows andsome linux, built two images and deployed all 18 servers in a morning, gotta love it.

 

[ChrisR]

Just been implementing 18 blades for a customer and he had some windows andsome linux, built two images and deployed all 18 servers in a morning, gotta love it.

I know, it was quite sad actually thinking "yay cool" when imaging a whole room of machines once talk about being a geek