Which product is suitable?

hi all,
i am very new to acronis products. our organisation use another product, which is not fullfilling all our requirements. i have few queries. numbered for clarity. first about our organisation:-

our organisation is with 10 servers(DC, Mail, ORACLE, AV etc..) and we use both Windows and Linux(Win XP, Win 2003, RHEL). we have around 500 client machines and another 50 in training labs in different buildings of our campus. all of them are PXE enabled. me as a system adminstrator, do not want to go to each and every computers in case of any system crash. i would like to send the previously created image from a 'image backup server' to a crashed machine so as to enable it to bootup again.

1. Which acronis product is suitable for our org?
2. can anybody be kind enough to guide me step by step to achieve my purpose.
3. if arconis is not suitable for my purpose, can anyone advise about any other imaging solutuions?

any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

hi!

acronis will defenitly do the job for you. i do my backup with acronis now adays, and use norton ghost 8.0 only for data recovery

i'm not completely familiar with all of acronis' different bundels, but the true image enterprise server contains both linux agent, windows agent, backup server and the management console for managing the backup works.

pxe booting to download the backup is perfectly fine, however, if the computer crashes i suppose you need to walk over there and initiate a pxe boot.

i can't think of i a sleek way of making it 'sense' that it crashed so that it pxe boots instead of loading the os.

 

thanks ethernal,

after a lot of research, i decided that the 'arconis snap deploy' might be perfect for me. i have downloaded a trial version and experimenting with it. i have feeling that it should work.
but for now, i am stuck with the 'pxe booting' . the client computers doesnot recieve a 'dhcp offer' from the server. i checked, my dhcp is runnign fine.

what could be the problem? any ideas?

 

is your dhcp server also acting as pxe server?

i'm not sure if it works to have the dhcp refer to another physical pxe, it might work, but i have never tried it.

every time i've been around pxe's, they have been handeled by the same physical server

 

hi,
yes, both dhcp and pxe runs from same win 2003 server. all the components of snap deploy is installed in the same computer. it also serve as AD. this machine was prepared only for testing purpose. the client machine search for dhcp for a while but it does not get a 'boot file' and exit. i feel it is something to do with arconis. i am not able to resolve it.

can anybody help?

 

does it get ip adress, but won't boot?

what ethernet card is in there?

i'm sorry to say, but in my experience it seems like the only ones you can PXE boot right of the bat are 3com cards, "real" intel cards, and the famous gold chip: realtek 8139.

i've seen soooo many ethernet cards that have PXE but it flat out refuses. i hope it has improved lately, because it's been sucking like a black hole previously

 

Hello all,

Thank you for interest in Acronis Enterprise software

beeyeml, could you please contact our Support Team for investigation? Please provide all the information to your request along with the step-by-step description of the actions taken before the problem appears and the link to this thread. We will investigate the problem and try to provide you with a solution.

Thank you
--
Michael Levchenko

 

problem solved!, with a little help from support, i could solve it.

thanks for your contributions too. it work pefectly now. i will do some more experiments(eg: Universal Deployment) before a final decision

 

hi, could you please outline how you solved it? in case someone else has the same problem

 

hi,
1. AS Acronis PXE Server and DHCP server were on the same computer, added to the DHCP server option 60: "Client Identifier" with string value "PXE Client". (this help came from the acronis support.).

2. Even if all the snap deploy components are installed in the same computer, explicit connections are to be made from the management console.

3. (silly of me) when components are installed, if rebooting is required, reboot before installing next component.

hope the above points would be helpful

 

thanks!