Replacing Ardence

[Valerie Truscinski]

Our district is looking to replace all of the desktops in two separate labs (55 computers total).  We currently use Ardence to manage the desktops in both of those labs.  For those that do not know or remember Ardence, it allows desktop computers to boot to an image stored on a server, the user can make changes, etc. and once the computer is rebooted it goes back to the original image. When software installations or changes need to be made it is made once to the image and all computers reflect that change without having to physically touch each computer. I have heard of Deepfreeze and Citrix Provisioning Server, and am wondering what other options districts are using.  Any suggestions or help is much appreciated!

 

 

[Brian Norman]

Good Luck.  Citrix Provisioning Server is cool, but expensive and not for the feint of heart.  I've grown less enthusiastic about nComputing solutions the last couple of years.  

Honestly, with the price of refurb PC's under $300 each I just keep purchasing them and replace them every five years.  Putting deep freeze on a physical PC is a great solution.

My 2 cents.

Brian

[Valerie Truscinski]

Do you know anyone that uses Deep Freeze?

[Brian Norman]

Mary at Walker uses it.  I made the mistake of purchasing a competitors cheaper product and it went horribly wrong.

Brian

[Germaine Carriere]

We use Deep Freeze at Karlstad, and I brought it to GMR

[Valerie Truscinski]

Is it pretty easy to use? (similar to Ardence) and who did you purchase it through?

[Germaine Carriere]

It is real easy to use, the only similarity to ardence is every time you reboot the PCs, all setting go back to what you set. Other than that it is just a program and if you need to make a change to multiple PCs settings, you would have to touch all PCs that need that change.

We bought deepfreeze from Faronics.

Do you have a fog server or some kind of imaging server?

That could used be in a similar manner and would be helpful for setting 55 PCs up.

[Valerie Truscinski]

We do not.  I'm assuming that you mean something like Alteris?  Randy helped me to image all of the laptops in our cart every year using that program until he left the district. 

[Germaine Carriere]

I removed Alteris and replaced it with Fog. It is free imaging software, that runs on top of linux. Not to difficult to setup.

http://www.fogproject.org/

[Valerie Truscinski]

So, there is nothing really comparable to Ardence out there...that does both the imaging and the ease of installing and configuring software changes without having to touch EVERY machine?

[Brian Norman]

There are Ardence type software available, but to the best of my knowledge they are expensive and complicated (which Ardence was neither, which is probably why Citrix bought them).

 

Fog allows you to image computers without touching them.  You can trigger it remotely.

[Valerie Truscinski]

I've never worked with Linux :-(

[Germaine Carriere]

The fog project website has instructions and links to video tutorials on installing ubuntu and setting up fog.