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AR15.COM
8/13/2010 5:05:53 AM EDT
I'm looking for something that will let us build up a loaner PC, hand it out, and when it comes back, quickly revert it back to the pre-loan condition.
Ideally, it would work like reverting a VM back to a previous snapshot. All user changes and data would be removed.
Deep Freeze by Faronics looks close, but I want this state-restore to only happen on demand, not on every reboot.
Any other ideas?
Thanks.





(eta –– this is what I've compiled so far)






We have used Faronics products in the Turner Store kiosks, so I started
there. I have not heard back from Faronics yet to see if their Deep Freeze
product can be customized to restore the system state only on demand instead of
after every login.















FarStone Snapshot seems quite promising. The marketing blurbs appear to
offer exactly what we want, and the price isn’t bad.















Horizon Data Systems RollBack Rx sounds like it is similar, but they
either have a rougher product or a rougher marketing team. The price is also a
little higher.



 
8/13/2010 9:32:08 AM EDT
[#1]
Why not just image it with something like Acronis and then when it comes back, deploy the image again. This is what we did for field use laptops at the PD I did some work for.
8/13/2010 10:02:55 AM EDT
[#2]



That's what we do now. Well, with Altiris and RDeploy, but it's close enough.
With a local userbase in the thousands breaking things and asking for loaners, it can take a significant amount of tech time to do this for each deployment.





Another tech stumbled on this one.



http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=D077A52D-93E9-4B02-BD95-9D770CCDB431&displaylang=en





The Disk Protection portion looks promising.



 
8/14/2010 7:18:32 PM EDT
[#3]
How long is too long to re-image?  15 minutes?
8/15/2010 6:01:18 PM EDT
[#4]



Quoted:


How long is too long to re-image?  15 minutes?


Per machine. Do you know how many loaners 5000 users can need in a week?