This session will detail how Yale’s ITS organization transitioned from a Mac imaging workflow that depended on a university-wide “standard image”, laboriously deployed via USB drives, to a network-based “thin imaging” system which forgoes disk images. We’ll detail how we accomplished this by leveraging our existing IBM Endpoint Manager (“BigFix”) infrastructure, which also gives us the flexibility to provide similar services to our Windows clients.
Key Concepts:
- Definition of thin imaging, and the various tools available to accomplish it.
- What’s driving the adoption of thin imaging for Macs:
- machine-specific OS builds
- efficiencies: eliminating turnaround times for new OS versions; reducing both back-end and field-tech labor
- Endpoint Management and IBM’s implementation of the concept.
- Why we chose IBM Endpoint Manager over the many other available solutions for thin imaging.
- Lessons learned by Yale during design and adoption.
Advanced Lecture – 75 Minutes
Jim Blau, Yale University
Jim has been a Mac sysadmin for more than twenty years, working primarily in higher education. He currently works for the Endpoint Engineering group in Yale University’s Information Technology Services.