Paragon Deployment Manager
Paragon Deployment Manager is similar in fit and function to the Acronis product, but it has some added disk utility features that set it apart from both products. his can be useful if you find yourself jumping back and forth between a disk imaging solution and a disk utility suite during your complex deployments.
Figure 2: The Paragon Deployment Manager console
Getting the master image. As soon as you finish installing Paragon Deployment Manager, you’re ready to push an image of your master hard drive up to the network share. You have three boot options that will get you connected to Paragon Deployment Manager: Linux Boot CD, Windows PE Boot CD, and the included PXE server. The PXE server (a free, third-party application called Tftpd32) comes completely configured.
To capture the master image, you first need to map a drive to a network share (preferably the PC that's running Paragon Deployment Manager). To do so, select the Network Configurator and follow the wizard. Although this method worked in my tests, I found it a bit clunky when compared with Acronis’s method. As soon as the client has a path to a network share, select Manual mode to start the copy of the hard drive to the network share. This process is very similar to that of Acronis Snap Deploy.
Deploying the master image. To deploy the master image to just one or two computers, you boot the target PC and manually point it to the server running Paragon Deployment Manager. For a more robust deployment strategy, you need to use Paragon Deployment Manager to create a new Session configuration. The Session can be automatic (in which the clients are set to deploy after they connect to the server), filtered by Session ID (the Session ID is set when the bootable media is created), or filtered by MAC address. One nice feature is the ability to add Post-Config options, such as reboot, power off, update files, and so on. Finally, you can schedule the deployment to recur on a specific schedule. This option could be useful for a weekly class that needs to have fresh computers every Monday morning, for example.
If you aren’t necessarily running the reimage routines on a set schedule, but you need to repeat them from time to time, you’ll want to create a Template. A Template defines a deployment the exact same way a Session does, but it lets you save the setting for later reuse.
Extra features. Paragon Deployment Manager also comes with Hard Drive Manager Professional. This handy utility lets you resize, merge, and undelete partitions; convert file systems; test the hard disk surface; and check the file-system integrity. There’s even a tool to edit or view the individual hard disk sectors.
Symantec Ghost
Symantec Ghost differs from the other two products in this review. Whereas Acronis Snap Deploy and Paragon Deployment Manager are great at capturing an image of a hard drive and deploying it to multiple machines in cold environments (e.g., classrooms, labs), Ghost is designed to live with you and your users in production. The typical scenario in which Ghost shines involves a user who is running XP and needs to be upgraded to Windows 7. This functionality doesn’t make Ghost better or worse than the other two products; it simply provides a solution for a different need. Figure 3 shows the Symantec Ghost console.
Figure 3: The Symantec Ghost console
Getting the master image. Ghost ships with and uses a PXE server. You can use a third-party PXE server if you want (Symantec even offers a detailed knowledge base article that can walk you through the setup process), but a PXE server isn’t where Symantec has centered Ghost, so I’m not going to go there. Instead, all the tasks that you need to accomplish are managed from the Symantec Ghost Console.
To capture the master image, you first need to tell the Ghost server where to store the image (called the image definition in earlier versions). Next, you need to create a Capture new image task. This task tells Ghost which machine you want to capture and which drive or partition to include. You accomplish this entire process from the comfort of your desk; you never have to actually visit the computer you’re capturing.
Deploying the master image. As in the previous step, you don’t need to visit the computers that you’re deploying an image to. Create a new task, and choose the operations that you want to perform. In this scenario, you would choose Clone, User Migration: Capture, and User Migration: Restore. Finally, choose the group of machines that you want to deploy to. Save the task, then click Execute. In a couple hours (depending on the amount of data on the user’s computer), the user will be migrated and upgraded to the latest version of Windows.
Extra features. Ghost offers many more features than just the ability to deploy a new image of a hard drive. For starters, there’s the user migration tool. If you’ve ever used XP’s built-in Files and Settings Transfer Wizard, you understand the concept. Ghost lets you capture a user’s files and settings, lay down a fresh image of a new OS, then restore those files and settings again.
Ghostcast Server lets you use Ghost more like Acronis Snap Deploy and Paragon Deployment Manager. It supports unicast, broadcast, and multicast deployments. In order for clients to connect to the Ghostcast Server, you’ll need to get them booted up in some kind of DOS-like environment (e.g., MS-DOS, PC-DOS) with network drivers for your particular network card. Ghost includes the Boot Wizard to help you through this process. Symantec Ghost supports PC-DOS, MS-DOS, Windows PE, and Linux.
What Are Your Goals?
As always, before you make a purchase, be sure to review all the extra tools that come with these products. That being said, your choice of disk-imaging product will probably have more to do with your deployment goals than anything. For simple classroom or lab environments in which your only goal is to get a fresh image applied to a hard drive, Acronis Snap Deploy takes the cake for pure simplicity of deployment. Paragon Deployment Manager has some nice additional tools for manipulating hard drives that some users might find useful.
If you need to deploy OSs onto computers that already have existing users, Ghost is the clear choice. Users get to keep all the data that they forgot to store on the network, their desktop wallpaper stays intact, and you get to perform the entire migration from the comfort of your desk. Does it get much better than that?