Process overview

Preparing your environment for deployments of Windows and Linux operating systems involves a set of steps you must complete in your environment.

For deployments on Linux systems, you must create and import images from installation media. You can then deploy the images to selected targets or create and deploy profiles for Bare Metal deployments.

For deployments on Windows systems, the IBM® BigFix OS Deployment solution uses the Microsoft™ Deployment Toolkit (MDT) to provide system preparation, image capture, driver insertion, and image deployment services. To prepare your environment for deployments, the administrator must use an accompanying tool, the MDT Bundle Creator to produce a bundle of tools and resources that are called the MDT Deployment Bundle.

To set up and deploy images to workstations in your Endpoint Management environment, you must complete the following steps:

1. Subscribe to the OS Deployment and Bare Metal Imaging site. You can enable the site from the License Overview dashboard in the BigFix Management Domain. Change the site subscription to include both the IBM BigFix Server as well as all computers on which you complete OS Deployment tasks.
2. Run the tasks that are listed in the Setup node of the navigation tree, and activate all listed analyses.
3. If you are provisioning Linux targets, install the Linux Image Provider component on one or more relays that are not Bare Metal Servers. If your Linux targets are connected to a relay that is a Bare Metal server, the Linux Image Provider component is already embedded.
4. Verify in the Health Checks Dashboard that all setup steps completed successfully.
5. If you are provisioning Windows systems:
   • build and upload the MDT bundle with the MDT Bundle Creator tool
   • import drivers from the Driver Library
   • capture images from reference machines using the Capture Images Wizard or create images from installation media (ISO images)
   • import images from the Image library dashboard
6. If you are provisioning Linux systems:
   • create images from installation media (ISO images), or capture images using the corresponding task and import them into the Image Library.
7. Deploy images to Windows and Linux targets from the Image Library.

If you want to manage Bare Metal targets from the BigFix Console, you must install the Management Extender for Bare Metal Targets component on the Bare Metal OS Deployment servers that manage these targets. For information about installing this component, see Deploying the Management Extender for Bare Metal Targets.