Recently I reinstalled Windows 8.1 on 14 computers (total 15 but one of them was a "donor" of OS image for the rest), using the Clonezilla multicast feature. I'd like to share how does it look like...
The deployment was done from a DRBL server which is including Clonezilla service. All the PCs received the same network packets in a synchronous way - so all 14 PC were re-imaged simultaneously.
The entire process took about 50 minutes over 1Gbit network (the OS image had 53 GB). Here, the DRBL server is relatively weak and old machine with 4GB RAM, running Debian Linux with a DRBL packages installed.
The benefit of DRBL is that any of the PCs can also run Linux directly from the server, without installing it (PXE boot from the network and system via NFS). The boot menu for selecting locally installed Windows or remote Linux is visible at 1:45 in the movie.
The below movie shows just the ending of the process. After re-imaging, PCs were restarted to apply changes made by a small script, which was started automatically, to:
