Information about RIS

[Stevehewitt]

Guys,

Anyone got any experience with Remote Installation Services on Windows 2003?

We are looking for an imaging solution, and after reading a bit about RIS in Win2k I'm interested to hear if anyone has used in on Win2k3?

Couple of main questions:

Can I setup RIS/Client to install with applications?

Can I take a image of a server / client after it's been in service for a long time? (E.G. as a backup - so if something goes wrong I can roll back as it were?)

What sort of storage will i need to look at ? E.G. 4 WinXP Images and 10 Server images maybe? (50Gb, 100Gb etc)

Any advice helpful.

Thanks,


Steve.

 

[cdove]

I used RIS at my old company and it is pretty . You can create images from a pc etc with apps installed. You can then create a software installation in GP to install any new apps so when the pc boots it will install the new software

The one thing i should say is that to create an image for backup purposes you need to run riprep which will remove any security from the server/pc you are imaging and will basically do a fresh pnp install before setting it up as it was. This may remove accounts etc which are needed to run things so i'd test this before trying it.

If you have any more questions let me know

 

[Stevehewitt]

Thanks for that.

Do you have any experience in using it to backup SQL or anything similar? (Veritas BE, ISA, CMS, Exchange) Anything that would have local accounts or anything.

What do you mean by a fresh PNP install? (Not plug and play?! )

E.G. In your opinionn is RIP good enough to use as taking an image of a server before a large network change?

Cheers




Steve.

"They have the internet on computers now!" - Homer Simpson

 

[cdove]

yep plug and play.

I personally would not use RIP to image a server. The reason being is that it will be removed from the domain as part of the riprep process. and then re created with any domain accounts being removed. I think it may even fail if more than 1 user profile account is found in the OS. RIS is basically designed to strip out any traces of user accounts pc name etc and create the PC fresh as though it had been installed from a CD.

If you are looking for a free backup disaster recovery option maybe an ASR or system state backup. Or even software mirror the drive and then break the mirror leaving both disks intact.

If this server is that critical maybe look a suitable dr option.

As for things such as ISA there is a free utility to export all configs etc.

I would never use ripprep to image any critical server