We are looking at doing the Bare Metal OS Deployment in BigFix using a MDT image that can be kept up to date using SA. Is anyone else doing this? I do not see much information on the forum about Bare Metal deployment.
Thanks,
Frank
Hello, I am not clear on what you would like to do, Can you provide more detail on your intended scenario?
Thanks
We tried Bare metal OS deployment about 4 years ago with little luck. Ran into some technical issues. Now we have been tasked with giving it another go. We are excited about the option of having our images that are off line patched by BigFix every month using Server Automation. I just have not seen much on how well it works or not works. Are there any major issues that will prevent us from using BMOD that we need to be aware of? Just trying to get an idea on how well it’s working for everyone else. Thanks!
Usually offline patching scenarios are focused on VM templates, which are brought online line, patched, and then taken offline again.
See sample plans for examples and the concepts
https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SS63NW_9.5.0/com.ibm.bigfix.lifecycle.doc/Lifecycle/ServerAutomation/SAUsersGuide/Server%20Automation%20sample%20plans/sampleautomationplans.html
I think we’d need to understand the use case a bit more to see where OSD and SA combine here.
However, the basic concept of automation plans are, if you can perform an operation via a fixlet, whether one we ship, or a custom created one, then it can be added to a plan. The plan can target different endpoints as part of its operation.
SA has fixlets, OSD has fixlets, and you can create your own, so its trying to understand how these might combine.
I’m using OSD for bare metal installations, on both physical machines and virtual. I’m honestly not sure how well it would fit in together with Server Automation.
Generally with offline image patching, it involves creating a VM from a template (including a preconfigured virtual disk), updating the patches, and then saving the modified virtual machine as a template. New virtual machines would then get provisioned using the up-to-date template (either a Sysprepped image, or IIRC VMWare has its own kind of “mini-sysprep” used in VDI provisioning).
I’m pretty sure SA has pieces to deal with all of this, but I’m not sure where OSD would fit in.
The OSD pieces deal with running sysprep, capturing to an image, uploading the image via the BES Console, and then creating deployment templates to deploy the image to new machines. Deploying the image over the network from the OSD server to the VM would certainly be a lot slower than cloning the VM from a preconfigured template. And virtual machines, being identical hardware, would not benefit much from the things that OSD brings to the table, like driver management, personalization rules, etc.
Certainly open to hearing more on this, and honestly I don’t enough SA experience to speak with authority on this, but there’s my 2cents anyway. Take it for what it’s worth.
So I think the question becomes, for those OSD steps, are there existing fixlets that can perform those steps, either from Bigfix, or custom created ?
If so we could potentially mix and match them and some VMWare content into an end to end plan.
Thank you everyone for your input. Looks like our focus has changed to Azure and we are looking at image deployment and patching in a different way now. HPOO connecting to BigFix via RestAPI to kick off actions against targeted clients in Azure. Interesting