- Introduction
- "Remote Boot" and Remote Control
- Using Ghost Successfully
- To Ghost or Not To Ghost
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"Remote Boot" and Remote Control
To create or restore images, Ghost needs to reboot the user's computer. Individual users typically do this from a bootable floppy disk, CD, or DVD containing DOS, network, and/or peripheral drivers, and possibly the image to be restored. In more recent versions, such as Ghost 2003, Windows can tell Ghost to generate a virtual partition, which consists of the same basic information that would be put onto a Ghost boot floppy, but put directly into the Master Boot Record. The machine then reboots into the virtual partition. (The virtual partition and its contents go away when the computer is powered down or rebooted.)
NOTE
For licensing reasons, Symantec includes PC-DOS with Ghost for use in creating the bootable disks and the virtual partition from within Ghost—increasingly important, as newer versions of Windows may not create MS-DOS bootable media.
In addition to Ghost proper, Symantec Ghost Corporate Edition (hereafter just called "Ghost Corporate") includes the Ghost console for browsing and locating computers on the network, and the Ghost client. The client can be included in a Ghost system image installed on the system; alternatively, the client can be installed on the remote machine after the Ghost console has found the target PC on the network.
For example, working from the Ghost console and using basic Windows network browsing, a system administrator could locate all the Windows machines on a network, and send and install the Win32 Ghost client on those machines. Once installed, the Ghost client can create a Ghost virtual partition that includes TCP/IP drivers, allowing the system to be controlled from the Ghost console—thereby eliminating the need to visit the remote PC with a boot floppy or deploying a physical boot partition.
"The Windows-based client is not available to the user on the System Tray or to Start, Programs," notes Bailey. "It's a tiny client-side technology that only speaks with the Ghost console. And we have a public and private key infrastructure so that only the right administrator can speak to it."
After the Ghost client is installed on these systems, the administrator can organize the systems—for example, by department or by subnet—and establish tasks such as the following:
Take Ghost images of each machine
Do incremental backups
Save each machine's "PC Personality"—user settings, look-and-feel of a given machine, contents of My Documents, and so on
The GhostCast Server lets the system administrator deploy images to one or more machines by unicast (to one machine), subnet targeted broadcast (selectively based on subnet grouping), or multicast (to many computers). A new option allows users to initiate Ghost restores and other tasks from the local machine, accessing remotely stored images.
According to Bailey, Ghost Corporate also supports other imaging methods:
Using the preboot execution environment (PXE) to let PXE-compliant PCs (which should be nearly all PCs) boot directly to a network and look for a PXE server. This technique still requires a person at each machine, however.
Using Ghost32, a 32-bit Ghost client, with the Windows Preinstallation Environment (also known as Windows PE or WinPE). This method includes more drivers and is a true 32-bit environment, versus booting into a version of DOS.
"Ghost will always have DOS or a DOS replacement, which is very small, for bare-metal restore (bringing a PC back that's failed, where there's no Windows available to use Ghost software). You need DOS to get started," Bailey says. "But Windows PXE is gaining a great deal of traction."