Owner's Manual

Dell Deployment Pack Overview 9
Dell Deployment Pack Overview
This section provides an overview of the Dell™ Deployment Pack.
This section helps you to understand the functionalities that the
Dell Deployment Pack provides to update and deploy your Dell systems.
Challenges That System Administrators Face
System administrators need to perform and manage increasingly complex
tasks that include:
• deploying a wide variety of operating systems
• deploying standard configurations across multi-generation systems in
locations across the globe
• tracking status of deployed operating systems and updates
Organizations usually order for systems without any specific configuration
because of their standard in-house configuration. Many organizations order
servers without specifying a base configuration, because those configurations
might not be finalized at order time. As an administrator you will be applying
your organization-standard configuration across hundreds of systems.
If you have ordered "bare-metal" Dell systems (machines that do not have
operating systems installed on them at the factory), you not only have to
install the operating system, but also need to configure the BIOS,
Dell Remote Access Controller (DRAC), Baseboard Management
Controller (BMC) or some other components.
Usually, you would use the Dell Deployment Toolkit (DTK) to change your
systems’ hardware configuration but this involves writing and/or modifying
script files or environment variables. This can become a particularly tedious
task when the number of systems, configurations and scripts to modify or
write increases.
book.book Page 9 Thursday, February 5, 2009 5:20 PM