Creating and deploying scripting environments

You can automate the execution of configuration tasks on Bare Metal targets by deploying scripting environments.

The Scripting toolkits provided by hardware vendors like IBM, HP, and Dell, include a set of tools to configure and deploy servers in a customized and unattended way. Scripting toolkits create a customized preinstallation environment (WinPE) containing the required drivers and utilities to automate the unattended configuration of servers, and to deploy operating systems based on scripts.

You can deploy vendor-specific hardware configurations to your Bare Metal targets, for example to update the firmware or to configure RAID volumes. For this purpose, you create a scripting environment with the tools provided by the specific hardware vendor and package it in a format that can be managed by the BigFix infrastructure. Then, through a dedicated dashboard, you import the configurations in your BigFix environment and deploy them to selected Bare Metal targets.

To use this feature, you must install the Management Extender for Bare Metal Targets on the Bare Metal OS Deployment Servers that manage these targets. When the targets PXE boot to their servers, the scripting environments can be deployed to them.

For information about installing the Management Extender for Bare Metal Targets, see Deploying the Management Extender for Bare Metal Targets.

To automate the configuration and deployment of your targets, you must use the appropriate scripting toolkits provided by the hardware vendor. IT administrators use these toolkits to create the hardware environment that contains Windows Pre-Installation Environment (WinPE), and drivers that are specific to the given hardware models, as well as vendor-specific tools and scripts that perform the actual configuration tasks on the targets. You can also create your own customized WinPE without using a vendor toolkit, and import it into your OS Deployment environment.