The operating system deployment (OSD) functionality of BMC Client Management uses the Pre-boot eXecution Environment (PXE) industry standard for its operation. This standard allows to install an operating system on a device without the need for an operating system to be present on the local disk of the target device.

This allows IT departments to deploy operating systems with the possibility to remotely (re-)install individual devices, groups of devices and even complete subnets of the infrastructure; the target devices either already have an operating system installed or they are "virgin" devices.

This BMC Client Management video (5 mins 19 sec) describes how to deploy an operating system on the devices in your network by using the OS Deployment wizard.

License considerations

OS Deployment is a limited module and requires a specific license.

System restrictions

The OSD system relies on Windows dependent tools for the creation of OSD projects, therefore the OSD Manager functionality is only available for Windows devices. However, the other two OSD roles, Image Repository and Network Boot Listener , are independent from Windows. This allows any relay in your infrastructure to execute either or both of these roles if they have a Linux or Mac OS X operating system.