Clonezilla: Free Mass Disk-Cloning Utility - Clonezilla Server Edition
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The truth is that within organizations and companies, mass deployment is usually a pretty nasty and redundant task. Nothing makes a system administrator happier than some renowned feature or software to automate these repetitive and, yes, boring tasks. Just imagine installing an operating system, adding drivers, necessary applications (office, antivirus, development extra stuff, etc.), applying the configurations, grabbing the latest updates ... and so forth. Over and over and over.
In the case of a promising investment when the company expands its division(s) (or establishes new ones) and perhaps purchases 50 new computers, obviously, the task of system administrator(s) is to turn each of them into fully functional machines. Doing the aforementioned installations in the traditional fashion won't work, mainly because it's time-consuming, inefficient, and too slow.
Chances are the management will also frown when the sysadmin suggests making another investment to acquire an overly expensive commercial mass disk-cloning and deployment software suite. And that's damn right-the company has just purchased that many systems, so unnecessary costs need to be reduced. But the task should be done!
System administrators are always rescued by open source solutions. Also, wise management is quite grateful for "open source" workarounds, not necessarily because they passionately support the community work or the initiative, but because these tools are always free. Clonezilla saves the day!
The system administrator installs and configures only one of the computers, creates an image, hooks all of the systems into the network, and massively deploys the cloned image to all of the computers via multicasting in less than 10-15 minutes. The official documentation of how to set up a DRBL server (which is required by Clonezilla) can be found here. DRBL stands for Diskless Remote Boot in Linux. Read more here.
Basically, as soon as DRBL is set up, your Clonezilla Server Edition is ready. If you have followed the documentation, then you know there are various options for massively deploy to the systems, such as IP-based, or based on their MAC addresses. The DHCP server leases IPs and does everything automatically if you don't want to mess with its initial configuration. But double check which systems you really deploy...
There is a general pre-requisite, though. The computers should be able to boot from network devices. Today, this really shouldn't be an issue. PXE and/or etherboot are nowadays supported by all kinds of manufacturers on all of their models.
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