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Prashanth Sundaram
Asked: 2011-04-19 08:14:36 +0800 CST

Provisioning environment(PXE) for windows xp, 7, server 2003, 2008 and RHEL 5

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I am working for a small shop where we want to provision all the hosts from one single location. Right now, we use Legacy RIS on Win server 2003 to deploy hosts via PXE boot. Though this method works, but I wanted to know if the community has a better way of handling this.

Though we don't use any Configuration management tool but my assumption (or rather plan to use one) is it will kick in during the last step of provisioning and will install packages/configs to bring it up to desired state.

Any good tools or methods that I can consider in a multi-OS environment?

windows provisioning automated-install pxe-boot

3 Answers

  1. If you want to stick with the Microsoft flavor, WDS is the replacement for RIS. Unfortunately, it's still stuck on distributing Microsoft flavored setups only. If you wish to look towards a more generic strategy... look at the FogProject. This isn't a "drop-in" replacement, but there are ways to integrate RIS/WDS in with Fog, as well as being able to deploy just about any flavor of OS across the network. Additionally, it has some very nice "imaging" utilities that you may find useful.

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  2. Have a look at this: http://www.ultimatedeployment.org/

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  3. Best Answer

    Thanks for the great responses. Since I will end up using the existing insfrastructure, I am going to answer my own question. :) I am not sure if this is a valid method but I gave points for all possible solutions.

    In short: I will be using SCCM for deploying Windows OS and packages. MDT for managing and testing images. When a client PXE boots, it will have two options: Install Windows/Install RHEL. After the authentication, the OS installation is automated. SCCM is used for post deployment operations and for linux I am going to test puppet/bcfg2.

    Thanks again.

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