Installing from Golden Images

In addition to supporting the standard software installations from an SD depot, Ignite-UX supports installing from known-good local system images, called golden 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 image that contains all of the files including configuration files that 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 golden image can be extracted in about 20 minutes compared to about an hour for an 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 simple to apply it to multiple clients. Very little or no user interaction is required during subsequent installs, reducing the chance of error.

Building this golden image is done by setting up a single system the way you want all of your systems to look, and then creating an image of that system. Follow instructions in this chapter to set up the first system.

Installing from Golden Images

Technical documentation

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