Speed: RIS vs CD

[phryder]

I have never used RIS and am wondering if I am missing the boat. Does an RIS install have a speed advantage over a CD install? Thank you in advance for your comments.

[chiners_68]

just a tad.

My RIS is Fully automated with integrated drivers, updates & software such as Office 2007,Mcafee,Adobe reader 8.0.

A complete Automated RIS install on a new dell will take around 45-60mins depending on the network. To do this by CD & manually install the updates drivers & software would take around 4-5 hours.

[phryder]

I have managed, thanks to all the contributors of MSFN, to put together a slipstreamed, nLite, RyanVM, Bashrat CD. It takes somewhat less than an hour to load, fully unattended. I have a scratch server in the shop running Windows 2000 Server that I can do whatever I want to with. I was wondering how much time could be saved, if any, using RIS over a CD install.

[mellimik]

I have managed, thanks to all the contributors of MSFN, to put together a slipstreamed, nLite, RyanVM, Bashrat CD. It takes somewhat less than an hour to load, fully unattended. I have a scratch server in the shop running Windows 2000 Server that I can do whatever I want to with. I was wondering how much time could be saved, if any, using RIS over a CD install.

I was once working for slightly bigger company that very well could be described as an international by its acts and holdings and all those endless remote offices. Anyway, my job was to update the workstation installation method and bring it to the "global" level. It took about 3months to come up with rather competitive solution that pretty much owned any commercial product, at least price wise and they also had me to support it. What I did was just a bunch of batch scripts, RIS and DFS to distribute images throughout our offices. Simple and easy to maintain. I heard the guy left to maintain it is happy with it and has no reasons to complain or change anything, as he learned installing workstation can be done in an hour with everything included, where as using CD/DVD-ROM would take that hour just to install the OS. Even if it is not the speed that rules RIS flat-file image format against others, it is the simplicity of modifying anything inside it when you basically just work inside folder structure using Windows Explorer.

The story is mainly told to illustrate the fact that RIS and flat-file image format used through PXE is in most cases superior to anything else out there. And, it is as free as they come.