Tags: Advantage Professionals, Cent OS, Charlotte, LinMin, LinMin Bare Metal, LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning, Linux, Megan Santosus, SearchEnterpriseLinux.com

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.”