[ Thanks to LinuxLinks for this link.
]
“Server provisioning is a set of actions to prepare a
server, taking it from bare metal to a functioning system complete
with an operating system, data and software.“It does not take long for users to recognise that setting up
more than a couple of machines is extremely time consuming. System
administrators realise this extremely early in their career. The
ability to deploy additional servers or to replace failed servers
without fuss and bother is important if business applications are
to keep running, and the pressure falls squarely on the system
administrator. Server provisioning tools come to the rescue.“However, the difficulty is that operating systems have
thousands of components with different interfaces for different
components. This means that an automated provisioning tool is a
complex beast especially if you consider the tasks that are
involved in provisioning a server. These include the installation
of an operating system, kernel modules, middleware and
applications. Further, the organisation will want the system
customized to their requirements such as deploying machines with
specific roles such as web servers, email servers, with appropriate
partitioning and packages. The server will also need to be
appropriately configured for the network.”