05-09-2016 06:55 AM
Hi all.
I'm failry familiar with SSR 2013 R2, but not Ghost (other than to know it does imaging). Yet I don't know if either of these two products are what I need for a specific project as outlined below. Here's what I hope to do:
For a small business client, I am going to upgrade them to Windows 10 on existing computers. The plan is hopefully to be able to image Computer A, immediately restore Computer A's image to a temporary computer and give the user that temp computer for a day or two. I then take Computer A and upgrade it to Win 10 along with everything else on the machine. Once complete, I remove the temp PC and put back in Computer A for the user again. My guess is that if I had to do this with SSR, I'd want to create a custom recovery disc each time since the machines are different.
I would then repeat this image/resotre process about a dozen times, one at a time for each computer. There is no server, no AD or automated deployment options here - low budget environment and so the work would just be hands-on one computer at a time.
Is SSR or Ghost the way to go? Not just technically, but license-wise as well. I am not looking to buy a dozen licenses as this is a one-time only project.
Thank you!
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05-09-2016 07:57 AM
I'm no expert in Ghost but the products are very similar.
What you are doing is basically a backup/restore (I know you mentioned 'image') so SSR is more than capable of achieving what you are trying to do. You should not have to create a separate recovery disk for each machine/model but what you are likely to need is to ensure the recovery disk contains the relevant disk/network card drivers for each machine/model.
Sorry I cannot answer this from a licensing perspective. You should probably speak with our licensing team to get their view on the number of licenses needed for this project.
05-09-2016 07:57 AM
I'm no expert in Ghost but the products are very similar.
What you are doing is basically a backup/restore (I know you mentioned 'image') so SSR is more than capable of achieving what you are trying to do. You should not have to create a separate recovery disk for each machine/model but what you are likely to need is to ensure the recovery disk contains the relevant disk/network card drivers for each machine/model.
Sorry I cannot answer this from a licensing perspective. You should probably speak with our licensing team to get their view on the number of licenses needed for this project.
05-09-2016 02:08 PM
Ok will do (with the licensing team). Thanks for the guidance as well. Now, I am confused on one point. If I'm making a recovery disc, and this is something I have very limited experience doing actually, but do I hae some option to specify the drivers without having to go around to each computer? And with that, I assume it needs to be a read/write recovery disc, like a USB stick, rather than a wreitable DVD?
Thanks again.
05-10-2016 12:24 AM
Yes, correct - you have an option to add additional drivers when creating/modifying the recovery disk. You just need to know which drivers need adding that will work with the machines you are going to be restoring to.
05-10-2016 05:39 AM
So I imagine then that I could just create a recovery disc on any Win 10 machine currently running SSR 2013 R2 (SP4), even ones here at my own office, and can manually add what drivers I need. I've only ever created a recovery disc on the machine in question and never did this one-to-many approach so I'll have to just give it a go and see how well it plays out. Thanks very much.