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We've just completed a very successful event at Infosecurity Europe 2008. Before the show itself, it was time for that stressful demo kit build.

Or rather it wasn't thanks to two pieces of Novell technology

Utopia
The first was the Utopia demo kit which is a set of virtual machines containing all of our solutions. These contain pre-configured solutions with data and step by step scripts to use when demoing. Alas these are only available to our partners and employees. If you fall into one of these catergories, read more here ( login required ): Utopia

This saved us considerable time as we only had to copy and then decompress the virtual machines we needed onto our demo kit, as opposed to creating everything from scratch.

ZCM image multicast
The second was ZCM multicast imaging. We built everything we wanted on one system which was then going to be duplicated on 6 others. This amounted to approx 69Gb of data to be copied around. Using ZCM multicast imaging, 104 minutes later we had our demo kit ready to use, apart from minor configuration settings which we did on the stand build day.

The demos ran perfectly every day and every time.

So what can we take away from this?

Well if you are a partner or internal employee needing to show case Novell solutions, use the Utopia demo kit. It will save you a ton of time by not having to build and configure it yourself.

If you ever wanted to know how well ZCM multicast imaging performs, here's an answer: 69Gb in 104 minutes

Disclaimer: As with everything else at Cool Solutions, this content is definitely not supported by Novell (so don't even think of calling Support if you try something and it blows up).

It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test, test, test before you do anything drastic with it.