Symantec Ghost Solution Suite v1.1 product reviews

Symantec Ghost Solution Suite is an imaging and deployment solution for the corporate market. We have found that it has increased the productivity of our staff, by shorting the process of loading OEM Windows on multiple computers all at the same time, through the Ghost Multicast Server.

Not only can we upload images up to the new machines. But we can then customize these loads with the individual software of each client, and load that personalised image back to the Ghost Server to either store on the server or write to DVD for future use.

We have also found that when we need to load a ghost image off site at a client's premise, as don't have the ghost server available, or in most cases these days also don't have a floppy disk drive available in customer's computer, we can create a Ghost Boot CD with which to load the image onto the computer.

We have found that we are able to use Ghost to upload the client's current operating system and software whether in working or no working order, to the Ghost Server, via a ghost image. Then use either a Ghost image on a DVD / USB Hard Drive, or on the Ghost Server itself to load a new operating system back to the client's computer. Then to use Ghost to extract only what is required from that image we stored on the Server and transfer it back to the client's machine.

In conjunction with Universal Imaging Utility this makes Ghost a powerful tool, due to the fact that our organization has managed not only to save time with loading imaging's but also managed to standardize a basic ghost image that can be loaded onto any configuration of hardware. We are now able to set a price for loading an operating system, no matter what speed the hardware maybe or what configuration it is. This has made our customer's very happy as they know what pricing they are in for before the work is started, instead of giving them an estimate how many hours we expect to spend loading an operating system.

Another feature we have discovered about Ghost Solution Suite is that when imaging data from a hard drive which has bad sectors on it, that we can configure Ghost to skip these bad sectors and continue with the download of the image onto another source, in the passed before we had the use of Ghost, we had to inform customers that the time that it would take to backup there data would not be worth it.

Overall with the implementation of Ghost Solution Suite we have managed to reduce many hours of repetitive work down to a under a hour of work, with which we can reuse until the image becomes out of date.

Useful Features of Symantec Ghost Suite:
    •  The ability to create a Ghost Boot Image on CD's
    •  The ability to create a Ghost Boot Image on a Flash Drive
    •  Supports for Windows SP2
    •  Multi Network Card Support
    •  Multicasting ability
    •  Reduces network bandwidth related issues attributed to Multicasting which the previous version had a problem with
    •  The ability to do a clean wipe on a hard drive
    •  The ability with GDISK to create partitions at the end of free space on a hard drive
    •  And there are many more features, which we have only just started finding

Listed below is the system specifications which we found are needed for the full use of Ghost Solution Suite:
    •  Pentium III or higher
    •  512 MB RAM
    •  10/100-MBPS NIC
    •  CD-ROM drive

    •  The amount of disk space required depends on the number of planned client migrations and average package size
    •  Windows 2000 Professional (SP3) /Server (SP3)/Advanced Server (SP3), XP Professional (SP1), Windows 2003 Server Standard and Enterprise Editions
    •  IIS 5.0 or higher (for the Symantec Client Migration component)
    •  Network-Internet or intranet connection

Databases - one of the following must be installed on the server computer:
    •  MSDE 2000 (limited to small user counts)
    •  SQL 7.0
    •  Microsoft SQL Server 2000