Hello, Since this list deals with OS provisioning (albeit Red Hat-focused), I figured this would be the right group of people to get some opinions from. I work in a data center with >2000 servers, about 90% of which are running some variation of Red Hat Linux, from 7.3 to ES 4. The remainder are Windows Server 2003 and Solaris 10 x86. As you can tell, OS provisioning is very important for a shop of this size. Using kickstart, we have been able to make our larger Linux deployments very quick, because there is usually a day or two in the project plan that allows us to get the legwork done in advance. However, we run into pretty severe problems when we only have one or two servers that need to be provisioned in one shot. This is because there is a lot of stuff that needs to be done in advance in the standard kickstart process - you need to harvest MAC addresses, enable portfast on the switch, create DNS entries, create a kickstart config, etc. While we could certainly install from CD, there is the possibility of non-standard package selections, and a by-hand %post of all non-Red Hat packages and tweaks. Now, as I see it, there are two options in the provisioning world - image-based (ghost, partimage), or native installation (kickstart, RIS). Each option seems to have pros and cons. So here are my questions to the group: If you run a multi-platform server farm, how do you provision the OS? Have you purchased a product, used one specific package, or cobbled your own from free tools? Do you use image-based technology, and if so, how hard do you find image management? If you use images, how do you tackle "uniqueness" (hostnames, IP addresses, etc.) of newly-provisioned machines? Any advice you can give will be much appreciated. I'd love to hear from anyone, especially those with large mixed environments. As you can imagine, we have to use different methods for each OS (Kickstart, Jumpstart, and RIS/Ghost), and I would love to see something that can handle them all, or at least simplify and unify the three methods. Mike P.S. And yes, as much as it may seem otherwise, I really don't have rose-colored glasses on...I understand that there's probably no *easy* way to do it, but I figured it couldn't hurt to ask. ;)
