"Brian McArthur, the director of technology at Advantage Professionals, a managed services provider in Charlotte, N.C., wanted a better way to perform bare-metal installations on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server. He and his engineering staff used a pre-boot execution environment or PXE Boot server and the kick-start process for automating Linux installations. While the approach is fairly common, McArthur said, 'It was a bit cumbersome and never really worked exactly as we needed.' For one thing, the process was not automated, requiring staff to manually assign roles to servers--a time-consuming and inefficient process.
"McArthur set out to find a more automated approach to bare-metal server provisioning to quickly facilitate the addition of new servers running the CentOS distribution of Linux in his company's data center..."
