I am trying to image about 30 laptops with WinXP, and I am using Clonezilla and DRBL for the task. We will start migration to Win7 starting Q4, so for now we are still using XP.
I used a Clonezilla live USB to capture a standardized image to a CIFS/SAMBA share on the enterprise file server. The file server does not support NFS.
To deploy the image, I used Virtualbox to build a VM with Centos 5.5 and then later Ubuntu 10.10. I mounted the CIFS share to /home/partimag but I found that I cannot share this CIFS mount out as NFS so I was unable to deploy the image with the image still residing on the CIFS; I had to copy the image to the VM's local drive.
Now using the DRBL live distribution, which is Debian based, I was able to obtain the image from a CIFS share and then share it out to the clients to be imaged as NFS (I think). I was able to use the DRBL live for some older computers, but since that hasn't been updated in nearly 2 years, I think it's missing some device drivers for my newer machines so it doesn't work on them -- this is why I looked at using CentOS and Ubuntu.
To mount the CIFS shares, I'm using the following command:
mount -t cifs -o user@domain //share_ip_addr/share_name/folder /home/mount_point
Do I need to do something different to enable the mounted CIFS share to be shared out as a NFS share so that the clients to be imaged can see the contents from the CIFS share as a NFS share?
The below image depicts my setup. The workstation has two NICs. The 10 network is the enterprise network and the 192 network is for DRBL imaging only. DRBL/Clonezilla does PXE boot and leases DHCP for the laptops. The laptops are shielded from the enterprise LAN; I am not doing any kind of NAT on on the server.
The Linux VM is built with dual NICs and are set to bridged mode so they appear to be a separate NIC from the VM host on the network even though they going into the same port on the wall.
http://img840.imageshack.us/img840/3349/multicast.png