Business PC Imaging

[Gumby]

So I recently acquired Acronis Snap Deploy to image my machines in a call center environment. This software is pretty stellar. I install the Acronis Agent on the floor PC I want to make an image of and use the management console on my machine to save that image to the server through the network. No removing hard drives or sliding in memory sticks. Its super nice. I can deploy that image through my existing 100 meg network to about 10 computers at a time taking on average 25-30 minutes for completion. I can install 40+ machines if I schedule it during nighttime hours, taking around 3 hours total. And yes it will auto deploy if I schedule it. That would be pretty brave in my opinion though. Currently I just set up the client machines network card to do a PXE boot and they will boot into a password protected Acronis boot loader environment. The deployment can be set up to either auto start once a certain parameter has been met, like 10 machines joined and waiting, or to manually start. The PC's download the image, restart a few times, then they will auto-join the domain. I tried it out on my floor here and the call floor agents didn't even notice I had worked on their machines other than they all of a sudden had tabbed browsing . That is the ultimate goal of any network admin. But all is not perfect.

 

Here is my issue: I can set up static I.P and DNS through Acronis but it will not automatically reserve addresses on my DHCP server. Kind of a bummer in that regards. It takes a little while to manually set up the reservations. I was wondering if anyone has used imaging software in the past and has a solution for me to auto assign DHCP addresses. I do know of the CSV file import trick to assign DHCP but this screws up sometimes and it still requires me to set up the file. I want automatic where I can run an exe type of file and input ranges I want the computers to occupy.