✓ LinMin Remotely Installs Linux, Windows & ESX/ESXi on Servers, Blades, Virtual Machines & PCs
✓ LinMin Remotely Backs Up, Restores and Clones Entire Linux, Windows & ESX/ESXi Systems
✓ LinMin Remotely Deploys Rescue Systems for Remote System Remediation
✓ LinMin's Browser Interface and API make it a Snap to Use and Integrate!
LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning and Imaging at a Glance
View this 7 minute video demo of LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning.
Who is LinMin? LinMin builds software to automate system provisioning, deployment and disaster recovery. LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning falls into the software categories of "Infrastructure", "Systems Management", "IT Automation" and "Hosting Automation" depending on the context and the industry analyst.
Who uses LinMin? Data center managers, system administrators, system builders, tech support specialists, and other IT professionals.
Where is LinMin used? LinMin is used in hosting and corporate data centers, system integration/assembly companies, managed service providers, software development and testing organizations, academic and research institutions, and more...
Why do system administrators and other IT pros use LinMin? To save time, reduce errors, reduce deployment times and bring consistency to deployments. To increase responsiveness to internal/external customers. To optimize the use of hardware and increase system availability. To recover corrupted systems in minutes without having to rebuild them. To spend time on more challenging tasks. To have cycles left to put out other fires!
How can I justify buying LinMin? LinMin costs very little, and it pays for itself in a few weeks. Simply estimate the number of systems you deploy (or repurpose) each year and multiply that by the average number of minutes per deployment (related to installing the OS and apps). From there, you can easily see the amount of time (and money) you save by using LinMin. If you only deploy 5 to 10 systems a year, it probably doesn't make sense (unless you have strict quality/consistency requirements), but anything more can easily justify your investment in LinMin.
What does LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning do, exactly? LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning provides 2 very distinct and complementary capabilities, provisioning and imaging:
- Bare Metal Provisioning, the ability to remotely and natively install Linux, Windows and ESX/ESXi and applications on servers, blades, PCs, appliances and virtual machines. After one uploads OS ISO files (or DVDs), LinMin lets the user provision systems in 2 ways:
- Remotely-Managed Provisioning, also called "MAC-Specific" or "Fire and Forget" Provisioning, is used in environments where human hands rarely touch systems (such as data centers) and relies on a database-controlled Provisioning Dashboard that the system administrator manages with the list of systems, their network and other configuration parameters, and the operating system installed or to be installed next.
- Locally-Initiated Provisioning, also called "MAC-Independent" or "On the Fly" Provisioning, is ideal for when a user goes to an individual system, powers up the computer to boot to the network, and selects from a Preboot Menu what OS to install.
- Bare Metal Imaging, the ability to capture a system's entire disk contents (the configured operating system, installed applications, settings and data) and store it on the network under LinMin control, and from the Imaging Dashboard, be able to restore the system so it rolls back to a known-good state. Bare Metal Imaging also lets IT professionals capture the contents of a fully configured and working system and then "clone" (apply the disk image) to other systems with the same hardware configuration. Imaging Tutorial (opens a new window)
- Provisioning Rollback is the ingenious synergy of bare metal provisioning and bare metal imaging technologies for Linux and Windows. By definition, bare metal operations destroy all prior contents of systems: LinMin's new capability makes it easy to automatically capture a system's disk image and only then install a new operating system. Regardless of whether this operating system deployment was done in error or performed explicitly to shift computing resources in near-real time during peak demand, or to test new configurations, LinMin makes it trivial to "undo" the provisioning event and roll a system back to its fully-operational known-good state that immediately preceded the bare metal provisioning event.
- Remote System Rescue is a very useful practice when a remote system is behaving unexpectedly and you can't physically go to the system to insert a rescue CD. Deploying Rescue Systems Tutorial (opens a new window)
Remotely-Managed Provisioning, also called "MAC-Specific" or "Fire and Forget" Provisioning
Server Provisioning Made Easy
From a centralized, web browser-accessible Provisioning Dashboard, you can review and change system profiles (operating systems, network and other parameters) for your entire operation.
 View the Provisioning Dashboard |
 Add Operating System Templates |
 Assign an Operating System to a System |
 Add/Edit System Parameters |
Locally-Initiated Provisioning, also called "MAC-Independent" or "On the Fly" Provisioning
Walk to a System and with a keystroke install a fully configured and tested Operating System without CDs or DVDs
Locally-initiated provisioning is very helpful in many situations. Perhaps you're building a brand new system (a just-bolted server in your data center or a system on your assembly line or a workstation for a new employee) and you don't yet know its MAC address (the network card's unique identifier), or simply don't want to bother updating the MAC-Specific Provisioning Dashboard. Simply walk to the system, power it up and hit F-12 to boot to the network. Then press a key to select an item from LinMin's pre-OS menu, and walk away: you're done!
 Select the OS from the Pre-Boot Menu |  Build the Pre-Boot Menu using our GUI |
 Add a Linux Role to the Menu |  Add a Windows Role to the Menu |
Bare Metal Imaging: Backup, Restore and Clone Entire Linux and Windows Systems
Disaster Recovery Simplified - System Repurposing Automated - Cloning made Easy
And what about Bare Metal Imaging?
Disk imaging is performed on systems as they are powered on. Before the OS on the local hard disk boots the system, LinMin installs RAM-resident software that captures all disk contents and stores them on the network, or restores a system from bare metal to a prior known-good state. The reason why this approach is excellent is because all applications, services and databases are closed, ensuring maximum integrity. But it's not for every system, because it requires that the system be unavailable for a few minutes during the backup. Overall, it's a great complement to traditional backup and restore software which perform daily backups of selected files.
 LinMin Imaging Dashboard |
 A System's Imaging Profile |
Sounds very interesting! Where do I go from here?
First, make sure that we provision the systems you have (see our list of over 100 operating system and architecture combinations LinMin provisions and images), then check out LinMin's prices. If this all sounds good, download your free LinMin trial and evaluate LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning today!
