Disaster recovery image creation

[walwalka]

My task currently is coming up with a good imaging solution for disaster recovery for our laptop and desktops that may be lost.

I have tried a couple things, but haven't found anything that really works the way I want it too. It has to be an offsite solution, we have SCCM on premise. Which works great, but we need something for when we are forced to the offsite recovery location.

I have tried novabackup by novastor, it works but the machine independent imaging doesn't work properly. 9 out of 10 times it will fail on the same machine I created the backup with when that check box is checked.

I thought oh maybe I would just slipstream the windows disk with updates and applications, well that's great for updates but a giant fail for the applications I need to load(Lotus Notes(shoot me now please)).

I did create a successful wim file of the OS with all the crap installed, and was trying to think of a great way to load that to whichever machine I want. This has to be hardware independent, I syspreped and generalized before making the wim. How would I image say 150 laptops with this?

Are there other options that I'm not thinking of? I just need some suggestions.

Thanks!

 

[carnageX]

Setup a free FoG server or get a license to Microsoft's SCCM.

Allows you to deploy images over the network.

 

[walwalka]

I'll edit, but the problem with that is our disaster recovery location is offsite.

I have SCCM here and working perfectly, but my boss is wanting the everything has been destroyed method.

 

[Demon10000]

If you're already using SCCM, you're good to go.

I have my primary site on a Hyper-V VM and it's replicated to our DR servers. I also have a distribution point at our DR site that gets replicated every time I make a change. If we blow up, everything can run from our DR site.

If you don't have a DR site, prestage your build media and copy the media off site. In the event of an emergency, you can bring the media down a start building machines. You can use a powershell script in a scheduled task to keep your pre-staged build media up to date.

 

[wbo]

To add to what Demon10000 said, if you have network connectivity between your main site and you disaster recovery site then I would definitely setup a distribution point at the DR site and make sure all your packages and images are distributed to that distribution point as well as any other distribution points that may need them.

I would also use a script to regularly copy your primary site server backup to the DR site to make restoring the SCCM site easier.

If you don't have regular network connectivity to the DR site, then SCCM allows you to take a Task Sequence and create offline media from it. The offline media contains the image and any software packages referenced by the task sequence as well as any required drivers, scripts, etc.

You can either write the offline media to a USB drive or burn it to a set of DVDs. The offline media can be used to image a machine from scratch with absolutely no network connectivity of any kind. If you go this route, you probably should update the media when you make a change to your image or applications.