Mass imaging/ Deepfreeze

[Juke00]

Hi all, I help run a small network for a software company. Currently we need a piece of software that allows up to update on a nightly basis and reimage the systems by the morning. I'm currently looking into DeepFreeze enterprise edition which does of of this quite nicely, but the problem is we need to restart the systems for some of our tests without the systems being reimaged, which i'm unsure if deep freeze allows. Is there a way to make it so the reimage process only happends under an admin discrestion? If not anymother software/solution I should look into? I appreacate any help, thanks!

[chiller15]

I've used DeepFreeze in a previous job and it was designed to keep any changes made to the OS separate and discard them when the system next reboots, rather than an actual imaging process.

 

Have you considered Microsoft's WDS and MDT to create and deploy images to clients over the network via PXE boot? Microsoft also have another solution called SCCM, which builds on WDS and has a whole load of extra features. However it is expensive and potentially overkill for a small business.

[datboi8192]

Since MDT is free. You could do something janky with it like create a task sequence that has no interactive prompts then run a script on the machines to set the boot order to PXE boot first so they reboot, and start the task. Maybe have a last step in the task to set the PXE boot to last when it finishes. Then you could even hide the task when not needed if you want to make sure people dont get wipped if they manage to PXE boot.