Windows 7 Windows 7 Imaging and Deployment

[PeteyWest]

My Company is a microsoft partner and I have recently installed Windows 7 x64 RTM and its working well.
My company is soon to be deploying Windows 7 to all new workstations and laptops.
I am researching the best Imaging tool/software to take and deploy Windows 7 and Vista.

I have researched the Windows Automated Installation Kit (AIK) with the Imagex tool and watched some
demos. I have found it to be a very manual process of using Diskpart to create the vdisk then mouting the .vhd
image then booting up etc etc etc i'm like wow.. this is really manual and annoying process?

I am after a 3rd party imaging tool that works with Windows 7...
I have found norton ghost, acronis, system recovery and to-do backup do not support windows 7.
I need a deployment tool that i can have the image on a network location adn deploy to the workstations, im having a lot of diffuculty finding software.

So can someone please let me know what is the easiest software/tool for taking an image, preferably via GUI,
like Ghost or acronis etc, to take an image of Windows 7/Vista machines and deploy FROM A NETWORK SOURCE please let me know!!

Thanks

 

[ahay]

unattend installs

This all depends on what you want in your images that you want to deploy. I just went through an upgrade from RIS to WDS for deploying our images. I have also included Windows 7 to be deployed with an answer file works awesome! If you have apps to install there is alittle bit more work but it can be done. If you need any help with your answer file I can proved mine for an example.

 

[SIW2]

Macrium Reflect FREE Edition - Information and download

They do free edition and also a paid one with more features, obviously. Works perfectly for me on 7 x64.

 

[swong]

Acronis True Image Home 2009 works beautifully!

Whoever told you Acronia does not work with Win7 is wrong. I just upgraded from 32-bit Vista Ultimate SP2 to 32-bit Windows 7 Professional and I just cloned to a backup drive using Acronis True Image Home 2009 and it works flawlessly. I did have two copies of Acronis, the newer build installed and works but the other older build Acronis would not even install on Win7 Pro.
I also got my copies of Win7 from my technet subscription...not too thrilled with having to download everything from Miscrosoft but if you perform your downloading around 3am each morning it's pretty quick otherwise it's a nightmare.

Right now I have one major issue with Win7 but it's not with Microsoft. My VPN client will not work with Win 7...quick call to EDS our support partner verified there is no Win7 version of my VPN client s/w. Busy testing all my business apps and it appears roughly 25% of our mission critical apps will not play nicely with Win7...ugh!
Link Removed - Invalid URL

 

[PeteyWest]

We need a network imaging deployment tool

These tools you all listed are tools to take a manual image of a workstation and/or create boot media to insert a disk to a new machine and install the image.
I am a demo presentation arranged for Acronis Snap Deploy, as this is the clostest peice of software i can find.
We want a PXE server that holds the images, then when new workstations arrive, plug it into the network, gets detected by the the pxe server and the image is pushed out to the workstation across the network.
Totaly effort is about 5 minutes.
No boot media, no answer files and no command line bs.
But im told the process takes a while to deploy the image, but its ok since i just kick it off and im done.

I cant find any other software that has some kind of deployment server that holds the images where you can push out the image across the network to new machines, besides this Acronis snap deploy software.
If anyone has any other suggestions please let me know.
Cheers

Oh and obviously can support windows 7.