[ Thanks to An Anonymous Reader for
this link. ]
“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…”