Imaging desktop PCs

So.

I've been out of the enterprise game for a while just have a special request for some full machine backups. They have some PCs with some complicated software setups. In my usual setups I use VMs so snapshots are easy, but what's the best way to image these PCs overnight and ship off to a NAS so if the hardware dies or hard drive corrupts I just do full restore from the backup image. Is there good solutions for this?

 

Install MDT 8450 with Windows 10 ADK 1809! - YouTube


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https://deploymentresearch.com/Rese...-image-using-Microsoft-Deployment-Toolkit-MDT

https://gal.vin/2018/10/06/building-windows-10-1809-reference-image-walkthrough/

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Or fuck it all off and just do VDI in the cloud.

 

Have you done/used this at all?

What's the user experience like?

 

The same as vdi in prem. Entirely dependent on latency and storage/VM performance.

You can have a great time if you live in Sydney/Canberra and use Aus east based clouds with appropriately sized vms.

You can have an atrocious time if you think that windows 10 likes spinning disk's, 2gb of ram and single CPUs when you're accessing Chinese or us east dcs.

 

And the inevitable follow up question..
Is doing it on appropriatley sized vms any cheaper?

 

No vdi, remote site over satellite will look into MDT.

 

Depends on your workforce. Education is a *great* use case i'll give you the tip ;P

It should be noted that MDT is *old* world at this point (I first built this for pre-SP1 Windows 7).

Modern Deployment (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/getting-started) now leverages Microsoft 365 (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise), Intune and Windows Autopilot.

This is distinctly different to Office 365 – it encompasses Office 365 Mail, Sharepoint – then adds Windows Desktop and Azure components and Windows Autopilot - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/windows-autopilot/windows-autopilot .

Per the picture in the diagram, it allows you to purchase devices from a Tier 1 vendor (Dell, HP, etc), drop ship direct to the client, they simply join a web-facing network and authenticate with Office 365.

This will then deploy your required software via Microsoft Intune (supplemented with SCCM if required) and bring the machine to the current corporate standard – including Domain Membership, Group Policy and Application roll out.

 

Nah none of that really works. I need something akin to VM snapshots and/or Clonezilla imaging. Will keep looking into options thanks.

 

What is wrong with clonezilla?

 

You know that Physical Windows can boot VHDX's right? https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ce...g-natively-windows-10-from-a-vhdx-drive-file/

If you somehow think that ~8 mins for a multicasted deployment over GbE (from a single 7200rpm disk server with 2 cores and 8gb ram) is "not really works" (and I've pushed this to 1000+ machines, at the same time) - just dump the various flavours of VHDX somewhere - then use uftpd (http://uftp-multicast.sourceforge.net/) to resend to the clients, change the boot order to the replaced file and tada - did it.

Enjoy the scripting to make that work, slower. I did this for training lab machines where we ran hyper-v on the local machine, then fed images to the clients and updated the local desktop with shortcuts to the vm's they wanted.

This was all because someone wanted to run a lab, bought a bunch of i7 desktops - when really they should have bought zero/thin-clients, then put in some VDI infrastructure for the ~130 machines (roughly 40k of server to do it, because academic, probably 30k licensing). We did this way for a client recently and we are able to respond to new requirements (E.g training room hire by an external 3rd party) in under 24 hours - including providing them an external VDI session for confirmation of the build prior to the session. We can reset VDI's in about 30 seconds - all of them.

Alternatively Faronics Steadystate - https://www.faronics.com/en-uk

Finally if you actually let people know of all the requirements and constraints, we can probably help a little more.

 

Given what we know now (as NSanity has suggested a lack of details) I would say Clonezilla would be the easiest solution.

Best is probably the VDI solution also mentioned here, but much larger budget and admin required.

 

Cap-ex Budget sure, Admin absolutely not and ongoing Op-ex, *wayyyyy* cheaper.

 

Just a +1 to say how awesome UFTPD is - it's more than for distributing large files over LAN... Here it's part of our production system for transferring files to and from our remote camps on satellite internet in Chile and Argentina, running for 6 years now - At a fraction of the cost and infrastructure of WAN Optimizers / Riverbed etc..

 

taking a VHD(X) isnt really imaging the drives. they are good suggestions for file recovery / profile recovery, but - for a truly granular (@sector level), restore capable copy (i.e. onto like hardware, to not lose driver configs / licenses etc.) check out Acronis . licenses are cheap, they also offer their own cloud solution to make things simple. or if your on a super tight budget (i.e. free) - check out Aomei backupper.

 

Image for Windows is what we use and it's a great solution which has full command line support with tonnes of features.

 

Veeam backup agent on the machines. Works very well if youre up for that expense.

 

Eh, The baremetal veeam agents are ok. They seem to get better when you get the Server variant w/ their own CBT engine. Backing up to Onedrive is pretty atrocious though.

 

Who backs up to one drive

 

The same people that don't need backup because they have RAID?