Issue TOC Print full article Print this page Download as PDF E-Mail this URL Flame the author     In this article Introduction Altiris Deployment Solution Other Products Reviewed Executive Summary How We Tested MS Add-Ons Report Card

To test disk-imaging packages we used four Dell Computer PowerEdge Servers, each with dual 1,000-MHz Pentium III processors and 1 GB of RAM and running Microsoft Windows 2000 Server SP2. We used one server to run each product. We also used Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS) 2.0 and a pair of 600-MHz Pentium III Dell OptiPlex servers with 512 MB of RAM for an Active Directory Domain controller. Our client machines, which represented our users' PCs, had Celeron 500-MHz processors with 256 MB of RAM, 10-GB hard disks and Intel 10/100 Pro NICs with PXE.

We tested imaging with both Windows 2000 Professional and Windows XP Professional. For client software needed by our users we installed Microsoft Office 2000 Professional, Network Associates' McAfee Virus Scan, LeapFTP (a shareware FTP client) and Adobe Acrobat Reader. This installation required about 2 GB of disk space.

For our deployment rollout, we dedicated a single client as our staging machine. This machine maintained a pristine installation of the OS and user software. We used the staging machine for software distributions and also cloned it, dumping disk images onto each of our imaging servers. The servers later distributed that image to each of our user PCs.

To test migration, we populated one of our client machines with user data--we created document files, downloaded programs, visited Web sites, added favorites, customized the desktop and added new shortcuts. We then ran each vendor's migration utility, creating executable files that we later used to repopulate a new machine with the user data.

For our performance testing, we distributed an image of Windows XP Professional and the software mentioned above. Our first test was to send an image to a single machine, and later to 10 machines. We recorded how long the distribution process took for both scenarios, including the time it took us to enter system information, such as the CD key, name and organization, and keyboard style, which is part of the Windows setup. A factor that degraded performance for some products was the time it took to visit each cloned PC. We used multicasting with Altiris, PowerQuest and Symantec when cloning 10 machines; Microsoft RIS does not support multicasting and could not distribute to more than four machines at a time before performance degraded below acceptable levels.