Imaging Software

So I just realized that my last post was over a month ago.  April was a busy month for me.  Anyway, we just purchased a license for a new piece of imaging software at work that is fairly slick.

Up until now we have been using Symantec Ghost and it has been working fairly well.  When I started working for the company that I am at right now, one of the first things I did was transitioned their imaging system from PowerQuest Drive Image to Symantec Ghost.  I had created some boot CDs that were specifically designed for our test machines and would boot in about 15 seconds.  These disks would establish a network connection, map a drive and then execute some batch files on that share in order to finish the boot.  About 75% of the boot process could be controlled by the files on the network share so modifying the boot process didn't always require me to re-burn the CDs.  This system has been adequate up until recently when we got a machine that is going to be used for the system test.

This new machine contains 2GB of memory.  The RAMDisk that I was using for the boot CDs only supports up to 1GB of memory.  So I switched to using Bart's Boot Disk.  It takes a lot longer to boot but at least it supports 2GB.

Then we decided to upgrade one of our performance servers from 1GB to 3GB of memory and we got a second performance server with 8GB.  Suffice to say, I think Ghost is now out of the question.  So we started looking into new software.  We came across Acronis True Image.  This software is pretty nice.  You can even image the computer while running Windows.  Also they have a tool that can allow you to install an image taken on one set of hardware and deploy the image on another set of hardware.  VMware already implements this type of ability in their P2V software which I've used before and love.

So I wanted to test the software out myself and see how it works.  I downloaded the evaluation version, installed it on my computer and started it taking an image within about 5-10 minutes.  15 minutes later, I had taken an image of my C: drive which contained about 40GB of data.  The image, with their default compression was about 20GB in size.  I then deployed the image to a new virtual machine.  This took about 2 hours.  This is longer than I would have expected, but I'm sure there's some kind of setting that you could mess with to make this deploy faster.  I then used P2V to strip out the hardware specific drivers.  Then I fired up the virtual machine and had a copy of my physical box running as a virtual machine.  I didn't try Acronis's Universalization software because I already had P2V setup and I figured I'd just use that.  All this was done and I never had to interrupt my work because I was able to do it all without shutting down Windows (other than the reboot to finish installing the Acronis True Image software).

Tags: Symantec, Ghost, PowerQuest, Drive Image, VMware, Acronis, True Image