The marriage of both unattended installation and imaging support lends itself well to a practice I have always been a supporter of, and that is to create your baseline build in a repeatable, automated fashion and use this for the basis of your deployment images.

Imaging is provided as a standard sector based image or an NTFS optimized image. The latter, more intelligently focuses on the data on the drive instead of just getting everything and can be much quicker as a result. It would be your regular choice when imaging Windows systems, but if you need it, Linux systems may also be imaged. The image file is uploaded to the server as it is generated so the speed of your network will likely be the bottleneck for any performance hits you see here- so (like so many things) the faster your network the better. On my relatively slow network a 2.5 GB image took just under 14 minutes, while my much larger 13.2 GB image took only about 30 minutes. I should mention that this data was pretty easy for me to gather due to the fact that the KBOX includes a number of helpful reports via its web console interface: among several others it offers an Image Capture Log, Image Deploy Log and Image Library Detail log. All logs may be produced as HTML, PDF, CSV or TXT.

You can currently only image one drive at a time. When asked about this, KACE reported they were focused on notebooks and desktops and did not foresee the surprising demand for multiple drive support. While this is less common today, you may have systems with more than one drive which would need to be imaged and applied individually. However, I've been advised this is on their list of enhancements and so it is likely to surface as a feature of an upcoming update or upgrade.
 

Let me start by saying this is a very quick and easy process. It is something that any junior administrator (even a user) would have no problem with. However, if you goal is to automate the process for an entirely hands-off rollout of systems, there are a couple of things that may get in the way: Actions are specified for “next boot” which is dependant upon a reboot to PXE for action. There is no “restart this computer” option provided in the console so you’ll need to issue the reboot command from a console window (shutdown.exe), call the user to restart the system on the phone, or walk over and push that power button yourself. Keep in mind this method is a positive thing when you are working in environments where there are users at the systems with which you are targeting. The need to respond to a menu does not exist with the unattended distribution option, but does with the drive imaging feature due to the need for an response to a simple console menu (see image).

Compared to walking around with CDs and DVDs, this is a definite improvement but not as ideal as being able to automate the process entirely. However, even this potential problem can be overcome due to the very nature of the KBOX 2000 and the features it provides. For example, if you are working with just a couple of target systems, you can have them boot to the recovery console where you can remote control the client from the web console and run the image job from there. The menu and other options can also be customized; this need to work with a menu can surely be addressed with some customization on your part and the KACE staff is a helpful one.