At this point in the evolution of Information Technology, your company will greatly benefit form the ability to do a bare-metal backup and restore of a PC, laptop, or server. Installing from optical media is a fun exercise once or twice per year, but a wasteful way for a solo admin to spend his time. When you work alone, every minute is precious–by creating a standardized baseline for each class of hardware your organization uses you can decrease your deployment time of operating systems annd applications from a few hours to a few minutes per system. The problem is, up until recently, the tools to accomplish this were usually pretty expensive, entailing an up-front fee to buy, a per system fee to use, and an annual support and maintenance contract to keep it running. If you’re the only admin they can afford, its a cinch that there’s no room in the budget for a very powerful (and proportionally expensive) product like Altiris Deployment Server. …Enter the open-source folks…
Bringing together a diversity of powerful tools, Clonezilla is free software, released under the GPL, and supports the creation and deployment of hard-drive or partition images for numerous platforms, including Windows, Mac (on Intel,) Linux, and any number of others. It uses projects like partimage, ntfsclone, partclone, and dd to accomplish efficient bare-metal backup and restore of PCs, laptops, or servers without any software license fee. Clonezilla comes in two varieties, a Server Edition and a LiveCD. and what you need to do will dictate what you want to use. If you are solo administrator of a network of less than 20 systems, the LiveCD is a no-brainer. If your environment is larger, or requires you to deploy numerous images simultaneously, the Server Edition is for you.
Clonezilla Live works like any other bootable CD you’ve worked with… You download the ISO and burn it to disc. Put it in the system you want to work with and boot it up. Clonezilla will prompt you for information about how to connect to the image store, and for what options you will use to create or deploy the image. The LiveCD mimics the most basic deployment functionality of the commercial products, but doesn’t include any management tools. Where you store the images will depend on what you have available, but a few of the myriad of options are a SAMBA connection (to a Windows file server, for example,) an SSH connection (Linux or Mac OS X,) or a flash-drive. If you’re planning on getting the image across the network from a server, you’ll need to setup an account with permissions to access the image store. Additionally, you can also use Clonezilla Live with a PXE server to allow clients to boot up Clonezilla Live across the network, rather than using a CD.
A solo admin can easily create his images, store them, and be ready to deploy them again in a couple hours (or less.) From then on, his workstation deployments will take only as long as it takes to transfer the image file across the network. If your needs are simple, Clonezilla Live is likely to meet your needs. If you need to do a large-scale deployment for free, check out the Server Edition.
Clonezille SE comes as part of another product called DRBL that mimics some of the management functions of products like LAN Manager or Altiris. It can provide multicast deployments, rename systems, and change configurations remotely from a centralized console. Mass-deployments can be accomplished efficiently and accurately by one person, and on-going management is simple. Hardawre requirements for Server Edition vary depending on how many devices you need to manage and/or clone simultaneously. A basic server would be more than sufficient to deploy and manage a small (less then 50) environment. The more hosts you manage, the more resources you should allocate to the server.
Common to both versions is an interface that comes with a learning curve. You have MANY powerful options, but its very possible and easy to misconstrue the wording in the interface and wind up with an unbootable machine. As with all products like this, try it in a lab first and not on production machines.
Whichever version you choose, Clonezilla represents a clear value proposition at a time when your superiors are looking to save money wherever they can, and by bringing these ideas into the mix, you will be perceived as the creator of this value.
And that can’t hurt, can it?