Sun Microsystems X4640 manual Performing an SIA PXE-Based Unattended Installation

Performing an SIA PXE-Based Unattended Installation

This section describes how to perform unattended (no user interaction required) installation tasks, such as firmware upgrades or operating system installations, utilizing a PXE-based image of SIA.

SIA is a Linux-based program that can be booted from a Linux-based PXE server. You can create an SIA image on your Linux-based PXE server, boot from it, and use SIA to perform deployment tasks in attended or unattended mode. In attended mode, you use SIA as you normally would to perform tasks using the interactive graphical interface. In unattended mode, SIA will automatically perform server installation tasks, such as operating system installation or firmware upgrades, without user intervention.

Note – As of the release of this document, SIA can not be used to install an image of Windows Server 2008 R2. You will need to perform a Windows Deployment Services–based installation of Windows. For more information on creating a WIM image and doing a remote WDS installation of Windows, see the Sun Fire X4640 Server Windows Installation Guide.

Note – As of the release of this document, SIA can not be used to install Red Hat Enterprise Linux versions 4.8 or 5.3 in unattended mode. You can use a normal PXE-based installation of these operating systems that does not use SIA. For more information on performing a PXE installation of RHEL, see the Sun Fire X4640 Server Linux Installation Guide.

Support for PXE-based installations are available as follows:

■SIA v2.0.1 (and later versions) added the ability to do an SIA PXE-based unattended installation of a supported Linux operating system.

This section contains the following topics. Refer to the topics that apply to your installation.

■“Contents of the SIA State File” on page 44

■“Preparing for an Unattended SIA Installation of Linux” on page 48

■“Preparing for an Unattended SIA Firmware Upgrade” on page 49

■“ How to Create the SIA Image and Prepare for PXE Boot” on page 51

■“How to Boot SIA From a PXE Server and Perform an Unattended Installation” on page 52

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