Pensieri di un lunatico minore

Imaging hundreds of blades

For a project I’m working on, we have upwards of 200 Intel-based blades across 16 chassis. One of the joys of this is that all of them need to be imaged to an absolutely identical base image, but then a few things distributed out that are different on each of them. Rather than use the traditional Ghost) approach, which in my opinion has increased in suckage substantially in the past few releases, we’re exploring a new option: FOG. FOG has a few advantages over Ghost:

1. It’s Linux-based and therefore actually reliable
2. Can image almost anything to anything
3. Has a central deployment console
4. Can use multicast to distribute images/etc at a high rate to lots of boxes simultaneously.

The big advantage over something like IBM Director? Price and customization.