Mirage's driver functionality is essentially non-existent. We have to determine what drivers a client has, manually find and download the drivers, and then fight the management console to prepare them, which sometimes is impossible because the driver files are in binary-encapsulated files. To top that, Windows ignores them if it already a generic driver in place for the device.

Better yet, we want a tool like DriverToolkit to be integrated into Mirage. VMWare would maintain a database of every driver needed for every device and computer and Windows edition there is. (This is easier than you think.) Mirage would then fetch the actual driver installer applications and send them to the client, which would execute them one after the other. A little bit of custom programming can prevent the installer application from us seeing its own progress dialogs and those "restart now" dialogs. The Mirage client would show us the status. After the client is rebooted, all the drivers are installed. Mirage can even go beyond that, letting us select at the management console which drivers we want to include on any given driver profile. So you can say that for all clients, install the chipset, LAN, video and audio drivers, leaving out the rest, if you wished.

Hi,

any plans to improve driver management capabilities in Mirage?

True Driver Lifecycle Management is not yet possible with our so beloved PCLM Tool.

Alex

Completely agree. Driver management isn't so bad if there are a limited number of devices and OSs in operation. If that's not the case, creating and maintaining the driver library is by far the most painful aspect of Mirage.

Agree.  Drivers and Mirage really is not very useful.  I don't think there is enough info on this... or maybe I misunderstand the features.

Is anybody able to use the Drivers feature of Mirage with a lot of success?