Cabales

I'm more concerned about the bandwdith utilization since it does not support a multicast solution. I don't mind having staff initiate the installation, since the alternative would be staff doing post-ghost tasks, but I'm operating on a relatively tight time frame and I'm not sure if RIS can actually handle deploying all the clients within the alloted time. I know Microsoft claims RIS can handle 75 clients per server at one time, but how realistic is this?

Ok, I've been steadily moving towards implementing RIS enterprise wide, but recently we have started to talk about changing desktop images again. This has brought up the question of whether or not RIS could be used to mass deploy the image to about 650 client PCs over a weekend. This is across several offices with a RIS server in each location. The worst of the load would probably be about 150 PCs to a single RIS box. My initial thoughts on this are that is a bad idea since, to the best of my knowledge, RIS does not support a multicast type image solution. However, I thought I would ask here to see if anyone has ever used RIS to accomplish something similar. This would be afterhours with nothing else competing for bandwidth with 100mb bandwidth to the desktops and 1GB bandwidth from the server to the switch. Do you think this is doable or not? If the answer is no is this something that the new flavor of RIS (WDS?) should be able to handle?

Thanks for your reply. I plan to use both 2003 and flat installs as opposed to RIPrep images, at least until I see how RIPrep images develop with the introduction of Vista. It's good to hear that the bandwidth utilization should not be an issue. Thanks for you help!

I'm looking into a RIS solution for our enterprise and I'm trying to determine if I will need additonal hardware or if I can get by with what we have now. A brief description of our environment: We have 7 offices located in Florida with the exception of 1 in Atlanta, all of them are connected via MPLS. In our two largest offices we running a fiber connected SAN, but the other 5 offices all use local drives for each server. We are running one domain, but each office is on it's own subnet, with the 2 largest offices encompassing multiple subnets. What I'd like to do is ensure that each office is hosting it's own RIS images so there will be nothing being pulled across the WAN. I'd prefer to do this without adding any additonal servers if possible, but getting new drives, RAM, ect... is ok. Is this reasonable? Should I be installing RIS on one of our Domain Controllers, they have 2GB of RAM and dual 3.5ghz processors, in each office? I know RIS needs it's own partition, but what is a reasonable size for the partition, assuming I will not be using more than 3 or 4 images at each office, but leaving room for some growth? I'm curious as to the bandwidth that RIS takes up as well, is it reasonable to reimage a machine or two during the day assuming a 100mb LAN (We have GB backbones in several of the offices, but not GB to the desktop, and some of the older offices still only have 100MB backbones.)? I've found this site to be extremely helpful while I've been researching RIS, and I've spent some time working on creating an Unattended Installation DVD using the guide here. I'm beginning to build a test RIS box now, but I've got to turn in some budget numbers by the end of next week, and I want to do my best to have an accurate idea of what I'll need to implement RIS sometime next year. My guess is diskspace is all I'm really going to need, but I thought I would ask here. Thanks for all your help and for providing a wonderful resource.