Installing from System Images

In addition to supporting the standard OS installations from an SD depot, Ignite-UX supports installing from system images. This method recognizes that many, if not all, target nodes in a network may be identical (or almost identical) to each other. It is possible to take advantage of this fact by building an archive which contains all of the files you want installed on each of the targets and then using Ignite-UX to install them.

This approach can have several advantages:

Because the compressed system image is unpacked directly to disk over the network, the installation process can be much faster than an equivalent process using SD. The time savings will depend on the size of the installation being done and the capacity of the network, but a typical system image can be extracted in about 20 minutes compared to about an hour for an SD install.
Instead of troubleshooting a target, it is often more cost-effective to completely re-install with a known, good system image.
When coupled with dataless nodes (all volatile data is on a separate file server), system replacement time or move time is drastically reduced.
Once a system image has been created, it is simple to apply it to multiple target systems. Very little or no user interaction is required during these subsequent installs, reducing the chance of error.

Building this golden system image is done by setting up a single system the way that you want all of your systems to look, and then creating an archive of that system. Follow instructions in this chapter to set up the first system.

Installing from System Images

Technical documentation

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