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Best way to clone workstations?

C

chockomonkey

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When I first started working at this small business, we were deploying a bunch of XP workstations. Our Active Directory guy had an image on our server, and used a BartPE boot disk to push the image. This shit was tight.

Fast forward to now--I just got the authorization to purchase a bunch of Dells with Win7 and get rid of the remaining 2005 XP machines. I'll be able to have identical hardware in all of these machines.

I have never created an image before though, and don't really know where to start (aside from getting one workstation with all the software we need perfect, without setting up any networking).

Doing a little googling, it looks like many recommend Clonezilla, which I probably could figure out as it's not rocket science or anything... but i like asking the [H] first as I fancy their advice.

Thanks for your time, y'all.
 
Whatever you use, don't join it to your domain or install any managed AV on it when you make your image, give the machine a generic name, as you'll be changing it anyway. There are many methods, both server based and single machine based. I'll leave it to others to recommend solutions, but I have used Acronis and Ghost in the past with great success, Ghost is a bit long in the tooth now, but back int he day it was the tool to use for multiple workstation deployment.
 
ashman said:
Whatever you use, don't join it to your domain or install any managed AV on it when you make your image, give the machine a generic name, as you'll be changing it anyway. There are many methods, both server based and single machine based. I'll leave it to others to recommend solutions, but I have used Acronis and Ghost in the past with great success, Ghost is a bit long in the tooth now, but back int he day it was the tool to use for multiple workstation deployment.
Click to expand...

Ahh thanks for your comment on the managed AV. I hadn't made up my mind yet on that.
 
Yes, this works well. Backup before you join it to ad.

Restore on new machine, having it do a sysprep or change sid (so wsus doesn't get confused).
I use acronis change sid option, or let vmware clone do the sysprep.

And do as much as you can doing gpo, so you don't have to do much work after you join it to the domain.
 
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