Lab Laptop Management Cart Options?

[afraser2k]

My employer is looking at options for housing ~40 laptops for student labs in a secure cart solution that would re-image and charge each device overnight. Their idea is that the base Windows image would be from another laptop or local domain server (e.g. CloneZilla). Students could then use a local login for various experiments and projects but responsible for their own storage.

They generally want to avoid heavy maintenance for updates etc where all updates and software installations are done in the base image before labs. I had suggested a local domain with SCCM would be more suitable but they'd prefer standalone laptops as they could be lent out when labs weren't on.

Do any of you use a similar setup for multiple laptops? Budget would likely be under £3000 for the cart but might be persuaded to increase depending on teaching requirements.

 

[Felix]

There's lapsafes at the higher end of the price band.

Alternatively, lap cabby do cheap cabinets.

 

[Caged]

Why do you want to re-image each machine every day? It seems like the wrong approach but whatever.

Bretford seem to be the go-to for these sorts of carts, e.g. https://www.bretford.com/product/link-l-carts

 

[afraser2k]

I'm afraid it's work by committee at this stage and the idea is that if the laptops are reimaged every evening they don't have to worry about profile corruption or managing user accounts. I've already tried to persuade them against the idea due to the "simple management" of trying to find the laptops every evening but will wait and see.

Thanks for the link will take a look for recommendations.

 

[nightmare99]

I would have a backup plan in place for when the "image them everyday" scenario doesn't work out

 

[Conanius]

I would have a backup plan in place for when the "image them everyday" scenario doesn't work out

This. Daily rebuilds isn't a great plan. At work we support hundreds of deployed laptops and we will obviously try remote fixes first, then 30 minutes of effort if it comes back, before we go for a rebuild.

The supporting infrastructure and effort you need to drop 40 laptops on a set of shelves and walk away and have them all done the next day isn't small. Forgetting basics like power, racking, network, someone doing the button presses etc.... You also need a 'close to one touch' build process.

We had a load of spare hardware to do a proof of concept 'scale up' laptop build environment. We repurposed a DL380 G7 with dual CPU and a decent amount of RAM to act as a distribution point by the build racks. We installed Win2012R2 Server and SCCM on it with 8 10k SAS discs in RAID 10, and then (dirty) bonded 6x1Gig network links into a Cisco Switch to distribute the build image out to the Laptops. Our redesign will obviously be 10 gig, SSDs, etc

That pilot enabled us to build ~20 laptops simultaneously without errors occurring. Our builds have a load of steps in - like updating the BIOS, enabling bitlocker, putting the laptop in the right AD group based on its hostname etc - and its ~1 hour from getting the boot on there.

If you don't have a load of spare hardware, power, networking, etc, you're short on money in my mind. You just need to make the laptops harder for users to break - IE lock down access.

 

[Biz.Kid09]

Have you looked at Drive Vaccine?

We use it at work, works great. It’s installed on every laptop and we set it so that upon a reboot it rolls the machine back to a base image and then the new use logs in.

Our main use vase for laptops is people using them for video conferences or interviews etc so the user saves the documents to their personal folders and then reboots it and the laptop is fresh for the next user.

 

[afraser2k]

Thanks for the additional feedback folks. Lots to look over and will provide to our working group on the plans. I doubt backup or maintenance has even been considered at this stage as it was supposed to be a "simpler solution". However, at the moment we are going through restructuring so might not have the staff for short-notice duties. Personally I feel they're just replicating our current student desktop solution for local control in case things don't work out as planned.

 

[Mr Plow]

Deep Freeze by Faronics is another option to add to the list. It's a shame Microsoft discontinued Steady State.

http://www.faronics.com/en-uk/products/deep-freeze

 

[Hellsmk2]

VMware Mirage would do all of this and is very easy to get up and running. If you've any experience of VDI you'll feel right at home with Mirage. It takes the pain out of large scale traditional desktop / laptop management in a way that SCCM doesn't.

You can you use it to fully automate laptop backups, push out OS's / updates / applications / drivers, and ensure the laptops are set back to a pre-defined image daily. Its also hardware agnostic, so if the higher ups decide they want to move from dell to HP, you can quickly restore existing images, apps, and user settings without faffing around.

 

[Nikumba]

We have one of these https://store.hp.com/us/en/pdp/hp-30-charging-cart-v2 laptops stay charged, wheel it about, locking doors

 

[swain90]

If you have the time, there's nothing stopping you creating your own recovery partition and answer file.

I've used this before; https://ccm.net/faq/4093-windows-7-create-a-recovery-partition

You could create your own script to launch the recovery procedure.