Linux server provisioning aided by LinMin Bare Metal

Megan Santosus from SearchEnterpriseLinux.com writes about a user’s experience with LinMin.

“Brian McArthur, the director of technology at Advantage Professionals, a managed services provider in Charlotte, N.C., wanted a better way to perform bare-metal installations on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server. He and his engineering staff used a pre-boot execution environment or PXE Boot server and the kick-start process for automating Linux installations. While the approach is fairly common, McArthur said, “It was a bit cumbersome and never really worked exactly as we needed.” For one thing, the process was not automated, requiring staff to manually assign roles to servers—a time-consuming and inefficient process.

McArthur set out to find a more automated approach to bare-metal server provisioning to quickly facilitate the addition of new servers running the CentOS distribution of Linux in his company’s data center. McArthur went online, conducted a search and came across LinMin Corp., a Redwood City, Calif.-based systems management startup that focuses on Linux administration and management. McArthur downloaded a demo of the company’s product, LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning and within hours realized he had found the right tool.”