Creating Golden Images

[Frank Salinas]

I am exploring the use of Golden Images to do mass deployments of servers. I am going to have several different HW platforms such as rx-2620's, rx-4640, rx-7640's, and rx-8640's. Becasuse these are diffent HW platforms, would I need a seperate image for each HW type, or will one image work for all?

[Keith Johnson]

To my knowledge, you must make a separate image for each hardware type.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

Golden images do not require you to make an image for each system.

Part of the process of building the Golden image involves doing an swcopy of the Core OS into the repository for the image.

When you boot a system off the Ignite server and tell it to use a Golden Image, a .gz file part of the install involves transferring and installing the Core OS.

This handles hardware differences.

After thats done, your image is laid down on top of the base system image.

This is why Golden images should be used for deploying the same software configuration on multiple dis-similar systems.

SEP

[Scot Bean]

Some people like to keep it clean & simple, one image per model. If you have 100's of these servers, consider that.

Others (like myself) just have a few different models and would rather not maintain many images. So I try to have one generic image that installs everywhere. It works for me, but there can be some 'gotchas':
- I like to create the image on my oldest platform, these seem to migrate better to newer ones
- The version of Ignite and the version of the HWE bundle you include can effect success on the latest HW

[Frank Salinas]

Thanks for the help, it is exactly what I was looking for.