Chapter 11: Beyond IntelliMirror: Shadow Copies and Remote Installation Services

Overview

Technically, this book is over. You could put it down right now and feel that you've explored and conquered every major Group Policy and IntelliMirror function. At this point in our journey, we've tackled all the true IntelliMirror components . We started with Roaming Profiles and then moved on to Redirected Folders, Offline Folders, the Synchronization Manager, and Disk Quotas. We technically wrapped up IntelliMirror with Software Distribution in the previous chapter. If you take a look back at Chapter 9, Figure 9.1, you'll see just how far we've come in our journey.

All these IntelliMirror technologies are terrific , and they chip away at the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) by preventing administrators from having to run out to a workstation to make a specific tweak or configuration changes or to fix something when users hop from machine to machine. IntelliMirror can help when it comes to a user needing to be sure their user data and applications stay with them, but it misses the mark in two key areas.

• What happens if a user overwrites a key file (or deletes it)?

• What happens if the machine (usually a laptop) goes belly-up, catches fire, or gets stolen?

We spent the last several chapters ensuring that our critical data is safely stored on the server. But how can we further protect our users from disaster? Actually, more realistically , how can we protect our users from themselves ?

To answer these questions, we'll investigate two more features: Shadow Copies and Remote Installation Services. Shadow Copies help users restore data by themselves, without requiring us to grab the restore tapes. This feature isn't part of the marketing that is IntelliMirror, but boy howdyit should be. I mean, IntelliMirror is all about data protection, and this fits that description perfectly .

The last major feature, as seen in Figure 9.1, is under the broader heading of Change and Configuration Management. That feature is Remote Installation Services (RIS). After a crash, or other loss, you can get the PC back up and running with RIS. Then, all the IntelliMirror features spring into action and return the user's configuration to exactly where they left off.

So, why are we dedicating a full chapter to non-IntelliMirror technologies? Because in order to get a holistic picture of how to care for and feed your network, you really, really need these two features implemented to have the full safety net in place.