Student Technician Training

Hi Brady,

We have attempted in the past to migrate our deployment activities from Ghost to Altiris but have kept coming back to Ghost. We had some success with deployment on Altiris 6.9 but when we migrated to Altiris 7.1 we felt that deployment left a LOT to be desired.

Likes:

·         The basic deployment engine is solid as you can choose between RapidDeploy or Ghost.

·         The integration with PXE and the Win PE Automation package is really nice

Dislikes:

·         I really didn’t like the tools for managing the images.

o   Example 1: By default when you capture an image it will automatically be replicated to all package servers. Not a big deal if you have one or two on big pipes. We have 10 and some are low bandwidth sites. Plus Site A doesn’t want Site B’s images taking up their disk space and bandwidth. You can change this option but it has to be done each time you capture and you have to know to drill through the options to find it.

o   Example 2: All the images show up in one big list in the console. You can’t arrange them into folders or assign permissions for who sees them. With many sites and users having every image in one big list is a pain.

o   These examples might not apply to your situation at all. We are a very distributed organization and because of a lot of “one off” configurations tend to generate a lot of images that the different IT groups could manage. If you’re only managing a few images or a single site your experience might be different.

·         The system as a whole feels fragile, there are a ton of moving parts with lots of points of failure

Right now my best effort is utilizing the different boot options and Altiris tasks to fire off Ghost clients to join local Ghostcast sessions that can be created on an ad hoc basis by local staff. This is leveraging the flexibility of locally administered Ghost servers and images with the power of Altiris’ infrastructure.

I’m very interested in what Altiris 7.5 is going to bring to the table in terms of deployment.

I hope that helps!

Andy Schuler

IT Principal Analyst – User Support Services

Pima Community College District Offices

520.206.4905

We used Altiris prior to v7, which we did not care for, so we decided to drop Altiris in favor of SCCM 2007 (which we have since upgraded to 2012 and really like it).

Tom

Tom Marcotte

Director of User Services

Skidmore College

815 N. Broadway

Tech Services Walkway

Saratoga Springs, NY 12866

(518) 580-5935