Using Golden Images with Virtual Partitions

Installing from Golden Images

In addition to supporting the standard operating system installations from a Software

Distributor (SD) depot, Ignite-UX supports installing from system images. This method

recognizes that many, if not all, clients 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 that

contains all of the files you want installed on each of the clients 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 depends on the size of the installation and the capacity

of the network, but a typical system image can be extracted in about 20 minutes

compared to about an hour for a SD install.

 Instead of troubleshooting a client, it is often more cost effective to completely

reinstall the operating system 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 golden image has been created, it is easy to apply it to multiple clients.

Very little or no user interaction is required during these subsequent installations,

reducing the chance of error. Building this golden image is done by setting up a

single system the way that you want all of your systems to look, and then by

creating an archive of that system. Follow instructions in this whitepaper to set up

the first system.