Windows 7 Rolling Review: Wrap-Up
Posted by
Randy George
March 02, 2010
The goal of this Rolling Review is simple: Simulate how easy, or painful, it will be to upgrade client systems to Windows 7 in a distributed environment.
Acronis' Snap Deploy 3.0 client imaging system focuses only on client imaging and deployment. If you're shopping for a full enterprise desktop management suite, look elsewhere.
Organizations have an option from an upstart called Zinstall, which lets users run both XP and Windows 7 on the same computer.
The KBOX 1000 series focuses on client management, including client inventory, software distribution, app virtualization, remote control, rudimentary NAC and a Web-enabled help desk, among other things.
Of the products tested, Configuration Manager is most efficient at OS deployment and user state migration.
LANDesk's range of OS support makes it the most diverse client management solution we tested.
Mainstream support for Windows XP Pro is over, and mainstream support for Vista Business runs out in 2012. The upshot? Windows 7 is coming to your organization. The right deployment tool can make an upgrade less painful.
Our review focuses on fat client deployment, so we tested products that provide the deployment, migration, and post-deployment management tools necessary to accomplish the task. The jump to Windows 7 from Windows XP, which is what most companies are contemplating, is a rip-and-replace upgrade, so user state migration was a key feature we examined.
We tested products from Acronis, Kace, Microsoft, and Avocent. We invited Symantec/Altiris, and while the company was willing to participate, its product was still in a pre-beta version for Windows 7 deployment and unable to meet our deadline for this Rolling Review. We also invited Novell for its ZenWorks product, but our publishing schedule didn't allow enough time to get the software into our labs.
We also tested XP7, a product from a company called Zinstall. Instead of migrating user applications, files, and preferences from XP to Windows 7, Zinstall installs Windows 7 while also preserving XP on the same machine. Users can toggle between XP and Windows 7. The software works well and is useful for organizations that aren't ready to let go of XP, but it doesn't meet our definition of a full-fledged migration and management product, so we didn't include it in this wrap-up.
Acronis Snap Deploy 3.0 provides a quick option for Windows 7 deployment. Installation was easy because all the server components came packaged in a small executable. Snap Deploy includes a PXE server with a Linux bootloader and Universal IP packet driver, which made it simple to get clients to the pre-boot environment over the network. Within the pre-boot environment, you can connect to the OS deployment server for image cloning and multicasting operations. Acronis offers some functionality to inject hardware drivers into the image, so Snap Deploy met one of our requirements for being able to deploy a single master image to multiple flavors of client hardware. On the whole, Snap Deploy is a good imaging tool, but desktop administrators will have to rope in several other tools to orchestrate the entire upgrade process, and the product offers no client management capabilities. As a result, Snap Deploy is only suitable for the smallest and simplest of deployment scenarios.
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