Setting up the provisioning system

Before you can use BMC Server Automation to perform unattended installations of operating systems on servers, you must set up all the functional components of the BMC Server Automation provisioning system. Generally, you need to perform these tasks only once unless you are changing the configuration of your provisioning system.

For a high-level view of tasks in a general provisioning workflow, see Bare-metal-provisioning-tasks-and-stages.

BMC Server Automation uses the following provisioning technologies:

• BMC Server Automation Pre-boot Execution Environment (PXE) — For provisioning Windows, Linux, ESX, and ESXi servers. To set up the PXE environment, see the following:
  • Configuring-the-DHCP-server
  • Configuring-the-PXE-and-TFTP-servers
  • Stocking-the-TFTP-server-with-Linux-boot-images
  • Configuring-the-TFTP-server
  • Setting-up-a-data-store
  • Stocking-the-data-store
  • Preparing-agents-for-provisioning
     For an example of how to set up and implement PXE-based provisioning, see How-to-use-BMC-Server-Automation-for-PXE-based-provisioning.
• Oracle Solaris JumpStart software — For provisioning Solaris SPARC and x86 servers. To set up the JumpStart environment, see Setting-up-the-JumpStart-environment-for-provisioning.
• IBM Network Installation Manager (NIM) software — For provisioning AIX servers. To set up the NIM environment, see Setting-up-the-NIM-environment-for-provisioning.
• Hewlett-Packard Ignite software — For provisioning HP-UX servers. To set up the Ignite environment, see Setting-up-the-Ignite-environment-for-provisioning.