symantec ghost cloning

[mono]

guys, helpp..
suppose to clone a 64 nodes of cluster using ghost server for IBM Enterprise S20, had do it before with rack saver(verrari) clusters and dell pe1650 & pe1550. The problem that I face now is, it really take quite a long time to clone it.. it takes about 4 hours to complete.
My question is, how can i make it less than 4 hours?, to clone verrari n dell clusters it only takes less than an hour for 32 nodes at one go. I had to clone it to RedHat 9 Progeny.
Thank you very much...

[Chakravarthi]

hi check the following link

http://www.ghosttraining.com/ghost_faq.html

[Steven E. Protter]

It all kind of depends on a lot of factors. How fast is the medium you are using to clone the system. Is it network, cable or tape.

I've used Ghost to take DR images of important servers and am pretty impressed with the usability and functionality of the product.

I really wish I had a tool like Ignite ported to Linux to do the job.

That being said, Ghost isn't really designed for the volume you are putting upon it. You should try it via an Gigabit network card and see switch and see if your times improve.

SEP

[NiCK_76]

Hi mono,

Symantec ghost server uses broadcast to copy image. So it will be very slow , if many server copy image at same time in the same subnet.
I suggest you use rsync to do it.

NiCK

[NiCK_76]

Hi mono,

Sorry, You can't use rsync before os installed. I suggest you use PXE to replicate os.

NICK

[Steven E. Protter]

Another possible scenario I have been exploring is kickstart.

Though a novice, apparently you can use it to create a customized install image of Linux for your systems.

That can be used to create the customizations you need to make your serves different.

SEP

[Huc_1]

If you decide to have a look at kickstart
then I found reading the following usefull

http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/11/04/advanced_kickstart.html

5529 points to Giza :)
J-P Huc

[Craig Gilmore]

Take a look at System Imager, or SIS, System Installation Suite.

http://www.systemimager.org

For those of you looking for an Ignite like tool, this is the closest that I have found.

[Dave Falloon]

I ran a low budget cluster for a little software devel firm that was developing distributed software. We tried four different setups, first was a kickstart server but it was slow when we imaged more than 4 hosts at a time ( no gigabit network, slow hard drives on the server ), then we ran a home made bootup script that formatted the drives and then ran dd to drop an image onto the drives, that was a little faster but it also had trouble scaling up. We demo'd another program ( can't remember its name ) but it failed for similar reasons, slow when many hosts pulled images and we didn't have the budget to upgrade the server/farm to gigE or faster disks. As backwards and boneheaded as it seems we found that cd ghost images worked the fastest. We had 8 cd burners in the office, and it only took about 6 minutes to burn a cd, and running the cd ghost images would blast the os onto a box in about 15 minutes.

So if you feel like burning a pile of images its pretty fast, you can have all your machines running in under an hour depending on how many cd writers you have ;)

Yes, I'm aware of how ghetto it is to burn 64 ghost images, and if your nodes don't have cd drives you SOL.

--Dave