Help with Mass Hard drive cloning station

[Tom Elliott]

@Junkhacker I don’t :(. I’ll admit, I don’t record any videos. Not that I couldn’t but I’m usually tweaking so many things at once, that my videos wouldn’t make sense comparitively.

[Wayne Workman]

I can do a screen capture of it, but my equipment is old as dirt and my setup is far from optimal. I’m working at home with a 100Mbps network, and a test windows 10 image. Worse, the test server and test box are virtualized so that further worsens my performance. So I’m only getting about 6 minute imaging times.

[Junkhacker]

@Wayne-Workman i’ve created a demo video in the past for a conference i spoke at
https://youtu.be/gHNPTmlrccM
i just don’t have the time to edit the video for a new one

[Wayne Workman]

@Junkhacker Must be private? I can’t see it.

[Junkhacker]

@Wayne-Workman fixed
of course, this is super slow compared to our current imaging speed. i image in almost half that time now.

[Avaryan]

@zionda said in Help with Mass Hard drive cloning station:

Hi Guys,
I’m trying to build a cloning station and i was wondering if FOG is suitable for what i am after

I have a i7 PC that has multiple USB 3.0 ports
Each usb port has a Orico 4xBay SATA HDD connected

The PC see’s 40 hard drives connected

Question is , is FOG capable loading a source image and deploy it on the HDDs connected simultaneously?

If so, is it also able to format the 40 HDDs?

Thank you !

Zion

In regards to the original question, it may be possible to assign each HDD to a virtual machine and deploy to each one. Can’t say I’d recommend doing that though.

[x23piracy]

@Avaryan @zionda thats really uncomfortable and kind of tinkering. Just forget FOG for this case, just use a cloning solution on that local computer were you have all the drives connected via usb3.

I’ve seen something different in the past at atos origin, they used IBM Tivoli but they connected the whole computers not just the harddrives, but just using a harddrive was also possible with that.

Regards X23

[Junkhacker]

@x23piracy yeah, if he wants to clone to the drives in the way he originally describes clonezilla is probably the best choice.

[zionda]

Thank you for the replies and discussion guys !

So i understand that i might be doing some workaround and it’s not the way to go.

what we are experiencing currently is that we have a limited of PC’s we can install at once from PXE (we can do approx 10-15 at a time)

sometimes the PC’s for the schools supposed to have their HDD’s replaced with SSD’s or bigger SATA ones and than i need to remove the old one and install the new ones, so i figured for this situations i rather put them back after i cloned the new drives with the images.

the FOG as i read is an Amazing solution but my question is do you think the right way is to connected each PC individually ? will it be faster (and less logistic) than doing it bulk directly to the drives ?

[george1421]

@zionda First you know my answer will be a bit biased toward FOG

From a logic standpoint, wouldn’t you want to use the same tool to initially deploy your images as you would for ongoing imaging? This is where I think FOG is a perfect solution. The same tool used to originally image the machines will be also used if the target computer is damaged and must be repaired and reimaged some time in the future.

The scope of your question has changed a bit now. In your OP I had envisioned that you would been to image 100s of PCs at the same time (mass deployment). FOG works great for this with its multicasting ability (sending 1 image to many computers). With your latest post your work flow seems to be a bit different. You will have to manually touch each computer to replace its hard drive. You could use a disk duplicator here or you can use FOG and unicast a single image to the target computer. In my company, with our fat image ~25GB it takes about 4 minutes to push the image to the target computer. If you think about your cycle time that image is faster than you can replace the hard drive in the next computer.

Regardless of the approach you take, you need to consider how much after the imaging is complete you have to / need to touch the computer. Will you have to name the computer? Will you have to connect it to the domain? Assign it to a certain OU? Install additional applications? Install any local hardware peripheral drivers? Make any other post imaging customizations? How frequent will these systems be reimaged (daily, monthly, yearly)? All of these steps may need to be taken into consideration when determining your imaging solution.

The image push is only the first step in the imaging process. You have quite a few others to consider when going from bare metal to finished product.

[Wayne Workman]

@zionda I answered these questions in my below post. I hold firmly that you don’t yet understand what FOG offers, and still suggest setting up a POC before asking more questions that aren’t related to setting up the POC. None of us here are salesmen, we’re volunteers. Four days have gone by now in this thread, you could have had a POC setup in a few hours and answered many of your questions on your own.

[x23piracy]

@zionda Hi, is there no network infrastructure? FOG is doing it’s job over the network and the clue is since every computer is connected to the network you don’t need to move em. You also can wake em remotely.

For your case i would image the computer, replace the harddrive and deploy the image back to the new drive what ever it is m2, ssd, hdd.

I bet you haven’t seen fog taking its actions right? if so please try it you will be flashed out

Regards X23

[zionda]

Thank you guys for the answeres

We will setup a FOG server and revert back
Hopefully all go smooth

The goal is to install 200-300 new Desktop with the same image every day
Approx 1000 units a month.

With that we are preparing the space to put the PCs with enough power outlets , ethernet ports, KVMs to put the 200 batch each time

Wish me luck guys

Zion

[Wayne Workman]

@zionda You can probably do 1,000 a day once you’re setup.

[x23piracy]

@zionda said in Help with Mass Hard drive cloning station:

Wish me luck guys

good luck and don’t forget to report and don’t hesitate to ask if you have any setup problems.