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With the increasing popularity of the Linux® operating system (OS) as an alternative server OS across all platforms the complexity in some areas of the systems management increased as well in contrary to the expected decline. This is mainly because of the diversity of hardware. Regarding the manageability of heterogeneous Linux OS clusters, it is a real challenge to find a complete consolidation approach, since every platform has its platform specific systems management components (e.g., hardware control).
The network installation service is also considered to be one of them, especially since every Linux distribution has different characteristics. Even within one Linux OS distribution there are different versions for each architecture. It is very common to have one installation server per Linux OS distribution or per platform.
IBM Cluster Systems Management (CSM) software offers a very advanced cross platform systems management which is capable to consolidate all of the hardware related cluster systems management tasks to one single server. But what is really missing is a consolidation of the operating system installation and maintenance related systems management tasks.
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