Enterprise Mac Administrator’s Guide, Second Edition

Chapter    6

Mass Deployment

Chances are that if you deal with enterprise-level systems management, you’ll need to deploy systems en masse from time to time. If you have a hardware refresh rate of, say, 25 percent per year and a total of 10,000 computers, you’ll have to deploy 2,500 machines every year. The tasks involved in the process are usually repetitive, lending themselves to batch processing. As a result, you can—and should—put solutions in place that let you automate the deployment of systems on an ongoing basis. In some cases, this means imaging systems fully loaded with software, known as monolithic imaging. In other cases, this means imaging systems and automating the installation of software, known as package-based imaging. And in ...