Hi All,

I am new to PAVMUG and seeking a solution to solve an interesting issue at hands. Any helpful advice or pointers from fellow forum members is greatly appreciated. Currently I am facing some challenges to manage an ever growing set of master ghost disks for various Windows based Operating Systems to hardware platform models. As our hardware vendor, Dell, phases out some hardware models that we use; we find ourselves continually having to make new master ghost disks for each model. We are using a combination of Symantec Ghost and Windows Sysprep to build master ghost disks on CD. Simultaneously we still need to support the older models out in the field at remote customer sites. Needless to say this predicament makes configuration management very tricky along with other things like staging.

In an ideal world I would like to have only one universal master ghost disks that apply to any hardware models that Dell throws at us but alas this is not to be at this present junction with my current knowledge. A few months ago I attended a PAVMUG meeting and heard about some of the magic that VMware based solution can offer. I heard about its ability to decouple the software from the hardware but it seems to be focus primarily at data center and Enterprise crowd with huge budget along with human capital to match.

What I am seeking for on the other hand is a less complex solution.

Any pointers or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Best regards,

Wayne