Server provisioning is a set of actions to prepare a server, taking it from bare metal to a functioning system complete with an operating system, data and software.
It does not take long for users to recognise that setting up more than a couple of machines is extremely time consuming. System administrators realise this extremely early in their career. The ability to deploy additional servers or to replace failed servers without fuss and bother is important if business applications are to keep running, and the pressure falls squarely on the system administrator. Server provisioning tools come to the rescue.
To provide an insight into the quality of software available for Linux, we have compiled a list of 6 desirable server provisioning tools. We have ranked them in our order of preference, with FAI and xCAT carrying our highest recommendation. Hopefully, there will be something of interest here for any system administrator that needs to set up many servers as quickly as possible.
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