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Data Centers

Windows 7 Rolling Review: Acronis Deploys Windows 7 With Ease

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. However, for organizations that simply want to deploy Windows 7 now, Snap Deploy 3.0 makes quick work of it.
January 29, 2010
WINDOWS 7 ROLLING REVIEW
Windows 7 Deployment Tools
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 Deploys Windows 7 With Ease
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.
Zinstall Runs Windows 7 and XP
Organizations have an option from an upstart called Zinstall, which lets users run both XP and Windows 7 on the same computer.
Kace KBOX 2000
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.
Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager R2
Of the products tested, Configuration Manager is most efficient at OS deployment and user state migration.
Avocent LANDesk Management Suite 9
LANDesk's range of OS support makes it the most diverse client management solution we tested.
Wrap-Up
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.

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. However, for organizations that simply want to deploy Windows 7 now, Snap Deploy 3.0 makes quick work of it.

Snap Deploy 3.0 installs easily. All client and server components are compressed into a laughably small 120- MB executable. A typical Snap Deploy setup includes a management console, a licensing server, an OS deployment server, and a PXE server. While these server roles can be separated for scalability, smaller environments can easily get away with installing all roles on one server, or even within one VM.

One gotcha we discovered during installation was the need to purchase an add-on license to deploy an image to machines with different hardware specs. While annoying, the incremental $12.50 per-universal-client upgrade seemed like a reasonable charge on top of the base $25 per standard client license.

Creation of a master image couldn't have been easier. A wizard-driven menu walks you through the process of creating a bootable ISO image that can be burned to CD/DVD, removable media, or floppy disk. The bootable image is a Linux-driven boot loader with a universal IP packet driver. After bootup, a client simply connects to the deployment server and waits for the administrator to kick off a unicast or multicast image deployment.

Note that you must image both the system partition and the 100-MB boot partition that Snap Deploy creates, otherwise your target machine won't boot without going through an OS repair. Once we realized this, we deployed Win 7 to five machines in 10 minutes flat.

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