Mike

Is anybody here using Altrinsic's "Hardware Independant Imaging Solution" for DS? If so, please share your experience.

Thanks,

Mike

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Mike Ainsworth

skakid

We're currently preparing to release it into full production in our environment and there's a couple of things Setral might add to this as well, but the first thing that hits me is the VAST number of compatibility classes we have here.

Some devices are picked up as separate items even though they're really the same thing (1394 adapters for instance), but all in all it's nice to have something there. We had to adjust the way we were doing other things to use conditions and assigning of other jobs, but I'm certanly happy with having something that does it for us.

Once it gets going the upkeep should be minimal.

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cl3tUs

We're working with HII and the vendor that showed it to us called it "Hardware Aware Imaging", which was kind of funny to me. I'm having some serious probs with it though.

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bsakata

We evaluated HIIS and it was not only difficult, but the drivers need to be collected beforehand.

Check out UIU: Big Bang universal disk-Imaging software - UIU - Binary Research Inc

It does essentially the same thing as HIIS, but keeps a database of drivers that it downloads and inserts into your image. (It does inflate your image a bit, 300 MB give or take, but its well worht it.) It's easy to use and works on the majority of computers. (I don't work for UIU, just work for a company that does a lot of imaging of a wide range of computer hardware)

jdean

I've used both HIIS and UIU and didn't have an issue with either.

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jdean33442@gmail.com

cl3tUs

When the Consultant guy came in, we worked on it and I still have an open post (Issues with Broadcom NetXtreme II series NIC Card/Driver) because Sysprep runs in 30 secs and it's not building my Mass Storage.

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Mike

I thought I would post back and let you all know my experience. I just implemented Altrinsic Solutions HIIS tool which is basically an overlay for Altiris DS 6.5-6.9. It is actually sold on the Dell Price List and is reportedly a popular add-on.

The version we are using is 6.9.0.12. How it works is it add several new tables to your express database as well as some programable "Functions" which are similar to stored procedures.

The Tool has a 4 phase approach, Identify the computers that are to be supported by HIIS, collect the drivers, export the jobs and maintain your driver library.

Each of these steps is fairly automated. It did a great job identifying the "hardware classes" based on the existing DS inventory and was able to collect all of my drivers using the built-in job creation tool. The drivers are stored in a unified library on the express share.

When you deploy a HII Image (job generated automatically), it queries the sql functions to create a driver injection script based on your hardware profile and sends the drivers down using a firm copy.

I experienced two issues:
1. the cmdlines.txt template file was missing a parameter on the token used to generage my "application injection". I notified the altrinsic people and the issue is already resolved.
2. The solution is built with a LAN ds environment in mind. All driver injections come from the express share by default. The altrinsic people were extremely responsive to my issue and I was able to successfully reprogram the function to work in this customer's environment.

All in all, I found this to be the easiest tool for creating a hardware independant image with an external driver library. This customer in APAC can now deploy an HII image to any computer in one of their 27 different sites with only one deployment server and WAN links that are only 256k.

Admittedly, I don't have much to compare it to. The last "tool" i used was the first version of HII tools. I understand there is a new one on Juice that you might compare it to.

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Mike Ainsworth

Setral

Word of warning.. I tend to ramble and get lost on tangents...

I've had "HIIS" in Dev since October, its been held back by more pressing issues, but I've been tinkering with it for the past month pretty hard, I'm just being overly cautious on releasing it, because my name is behind it .

If you've used HIIS before and have not used 6.9.0.12 I HIGHLY recommend to give the 6.9.0.12 version a shot, there are several features included that the previous ones lacked. One of the main enhancements that occured in this version or the one just before, is if you have classes set, and change what drivers you're filtering out, it only removes the impacted classes and not all of them, much shorter refresh time.

Now.. about our Environment. I upgraded to 6.9.0.12 from a much older version on Saturday the 9th, wish I had done this when this version came out. We have about 3200 PCs, bunch of "One Offs" and I have collected 1238 of them, having 1180 of them supported by HIIS, the other 50 or so are secured PCs so I can't grab drivers at the moment.

We're using the Device ID method, granted it causes more compatibility classes but reduces driver issues, where two Devices Might have the same name, but the driver is clearly different. One downside to this method, is every time I add a PC, I have to go through the list of Devices known and tell it what to filter out, often as Skakid pointed out, its a "1394" Network Adapter. So first capture between Saturday and Monday put us at 1238 PCs, 271 compatibility classes, I've weeded that down to 166 classes.

For our New Equipment guys, to make our lives easier, we're going to just have them do an "Initial Deploy", so all known drivers for that Model get loaded, and nothing gets missed. Then it runs a location check and installs software from the server depending on location, and then runs a model check that deploys model specific software to the PCs. So far in Dev, I've only encountered one "Bug" and that is with the SoundMax drivers not capturing properly. Altrinsic is aware of it and working on it at the moment. A work around, is to find the driver folder, edit the INF and manually copy the listed files to the driver folder and it'll work from there.

Compared to our current method, this is far far easier.


Oh.. and anyone using it in production want to throw any advice my way, incase "I'm doing it wrong" I won't tun it down

Nick

GREAT feedback Setral!

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sabshagen

I am using DS 6.5 and have been working with it for about 6 months. Many things to learn. I have been looking at HII Tools, but the webpage refers to a version for Dell only, and I haven't found anywhere that specifies using on HP blades (BL20P G2 and 25P G3). Has anyone out there used HII with these platforms? Thanks

dstclair

We aren't entirely sure what causes that to happen, but it did impact customers using HIIS until we added the following into the prepare scripts:

sysprep -bmsd
sysprep -clean

Run those before sealing and you should be good.

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mack_jason

I've been using the HIIS tools for about six months now and had some issues early on but I upgraded to version release 6.9.0.12 and it seems very stable. I still have issues with SoundMax drivers on machines that use Intel chips with the HIIS is that the HIIS tool doesn't seem to copy all of the needed files from the machine.

I'm using the drop in driver option to resolve this but it takes some configuration.

Setral

Hey Mack thanks for including that, we have the same issue with the SoundMax drivers, and I've had a couple of other drivers just recently simply not go from the class folder to the Library that I'm talking to Altrinsic about. But overall, HIIS really does tend to be a product that you simply set and forget in most cases.