As part of some maintenance here, I did a little research as to how to set up NetBoot for various different Macs. For this piece, interchange ‘NetBoot’ with ‘NetInstall’ if you’re being pedantic – I’m NetBooting the install disc for a particular OS. NetBooting a full install should also be possible using the same techniques.
Mavericks Server (an app free to all developers) has a built-in NetBoot (NetInstall) server GUI, but it only supports a handful of modern versions of OS X. Thankfully, if you follow the instructions in the bootpd manpage you can manually build NetBoot images supporting both PowerPC and Intel Macs going back to OS X v10.2.
Because we can.
Much easier to keep the installers on USB sticks than setting up a server.
Not when you have 40 of them per. rack and the racks are 3000 miles away.
That’s when you use PXE instead, so you can also netboot things like Windows installers, Linux installers, live diagnostic systems like ubcd or Finnix, or even FreeDOS images with BIOS flasher tools.
Not very useful for PowerPC machines!
Why not, you can boot PPC Linux over PXE.
A server rack should be VMs of course.
You’ve still got to get the hypervisors on them…
I know people like to virtualize everything, but there are more than a few instances where this is most definitely not a good idea, although it certainly doesn’t stop people from trying.
To list a few situations where virtualisation is not desireable:
– High I/O workloads (databases, media, VOD, etc)
– Low latency requirements (automation, security, etc)
– Time sensitive applications (there is no RTC, and the emulated one might/will drift based on the amount of time your VM causes the hypervisor to spend waiting on system calls)
– Direct hardware access (PBX, OpenCL, etc)
There are more, but you get the idea.
Classic.
Deploystudio is great for this also. I use a combination of Deploystudio and Munki to maintain around 100 macs. Deploystudio can also netboot PC’s if setup correctly.
Edited 2014-04-27 01:29 UTC
It’s also useful if you have a PPC wih a broken CD. Not all of them can boot off USB.