Novell LINUX ENTERPRISE SERVER 11 - DEPLOYMENT, Deployment Manual

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Section 21.2, “Rule-Based Autoinstallation” (page 297) Details
5.3 Deploying More than 100
Workstations
Most of the considerations brought up for medium installation scenarios in Section 5.1,
“Deploying up to 10 Workstations” (page 79) still hold true for large scale deployments.
However, with a growing number of installation targets, the benefits of a fully automated
installation method outweigh its disadvantages.
It pays off to invest a considerable amount of time to create a sophisticated rule and
class framework in AutoYaST to match the requirements of a huge deployment site.
Not having to touch each target separately can save you a tremendous amount of time
depending on the scope of your installation project.
As an alternative, and if user settings should be done during the first bootup, create
preload images with kiwi and firstboot. Deploying such images could even be done by
a PXE boot server specialized for this task. For more details, see
Chapter 17, KIWI
(page 255), Chapter 21, Automated Installation (page 285), and Chapter 20, Deploying
Customized Preinstallations (page 271).
88 Deployment Guide