[OPLINTECH] Calling all Clonezilla experts

[Ken Butler]

It depends what you want to use it for. If you're looking for a quick and
easy clone - go with Live. If you want more robust tools and the
possibility of mass cloning over the network or even having a network
cloning server with an image repository, SE is your best bet. FOG is
probably the more popular option for a network cloning server and image
repository, however for the BIOS compatibility reasons I state below, I
ended up going with CloneZilla SE for that purpose.

*CloneZilla Live* is what I use to directly clone one computer to another.
It's fast, and once you use it a few times, pretty easy. The scary part is
getting over the "I hope I don't overwrite the wrong hard drive here" fear.
The main advantage is simplicity and a faster boot up time versus SE. I
believe you can actually do PXE booting / cloning with it, however I have
not used it for that purpose personally. I usually clone from an image on
an external HDD or from another computer.

*CloneZilla SE (Server Edition)* Is much more robust, but it is overkill
for simple jobs like cloning one computer to another. Server Edition also
offers more tools like GParted, which you can use to format partitions, and
a visual GUI for doing those kinds of things. There are two ways to use
CloneZilla SE - the "live" version that you use by creating bootable media
using their ISO image, which then boots you into a DRBL environment with an
X-Windows GUI, or by actually installing it on a DRBL system. Personally, I
am not very familiar with DRBL, so I went with the Live version. Someday I
would like to take the time to actually create a DRBL server install with
CloneZilla on it.

*Example SE use: *Last year I rolled out 16 new public computers for our
main location and 8 for our branch location using CloneZilla SE in a
virtualized environment on our VMWare host. I still have that server
actually, although I haven't had need to use it. In theory I could store
images of computers on that server, PXE boot a computer or multiple
computers, and reload them over the network. I created one public computer
exactly how I wanted it, created an image of it on our virtual CloneZilla
SE server, and then set up all of our new public computers to PXE boot and
pushed out that image to all of them simultaneously over the network. It
went off without any problems, although it did take a LONG time to push
that many images out over our network due to bottlenecks. I think I started
on a Sunday morning when we were closed, and it finished up very early
Monday morning. It took somewhere around 18-20 hours for them all to
finish. It was still well before we opened, but then I had to go to each
one and connect it to the domain, test them out to make sure all services
were running, etc. Had I known it was going to take that long, I would have
started when we closed Saturday evening.

I actually wanted to use FOG over CloneZilla SE, however the public
computers that we bought had a very new BIOS that was not supported by FOG.
I got everything ready to go with FOG on a virtual server, but when I tried
to create an image, it failed due to unsupported BIOS errors. I read
through the Wikipedia and other sites on it, tried loading different
kernels, but nothing worked, and when I looked at the date of the BIOS
revision (2013), I saw that the last time the kernel and supported BIOS
sets was updated for FOG was a year or two before that. So the FOG Kernel
simply couldn't support my computers BIOS. Maybe there was a way around it,
but after tinkering with it for a week in my spare time, I was ready to try
CloneZilla instead.

Hope this helps. I'm happy to answer any questions about using the SE
version.. although it has been nearly a year since I used it, and I'm
definitely no expert on either SE or Linux.


On Wed, Mar 11, 2015 at 2:39 PM, Jim Lack <J.Lack at rrpl.org> wrote:

>  I’m looking for a way to clone computers as needed.  I’ve heard people
> on this list talk about Clonezilla.  Started researching this and I see
> there are two versions, Clonezilla Live and Clonezilla SE.  Can anyone
> recommend one over the other?  What are the disk space requirements as I
> was unable to find that info.  Can it be loaded on desktop hardware or does
> it have to be loaded on a full-fledged server (Clonezilla SE)?  Your input
> is appreciated.
>
>
>
> Thank You,
>
>
>
> Jim Lack
>
> Technology Support Manager
>
> Rocky River Public Library
>
> 1600 Hampton Rd.
>
> Rocky River, OH  44116
>
> 440-333-7610 x3765
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> OPLINTECH mailing list
> OPLINTECH at lists.oplin.org
> http://lists.oplin.org/mailman/listinfo/oplintech
>
>
>


-- 
Ken Butler
hcotech at holmeslib.org
Head of Information Technology
Holmes County District Public Library
3102 Glen Drive
Millersburg, OH 44654
PH: 330-674-5972 ext 224
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