Why Image Deployment Is Worth the Effort

Want to cut provisioning time without cutting corners? It’s time to get serious about image deployment.

Most teams start with scripted installs: booting a blank system, stepping through configuration, and installing packages one by one. This method is fine for small scale, but if you’re running data centers or edge fleets, you need something faster, repeatable, and streamlined.

That’s where image deployment comes in. (We also covered this topic on our YouTube channel, video 1 and video 2!)

What Is Image Deployment?

Image deployment skips the slow steps. Instead of building each system from scratch, you clone a fully configured golden image, a complete O/S with all your standard config, packages, and tuning baked in.

Here’s how you image deploy:

First Step: Build a Golden Image

Start with your base O/S. Layer in your company standards, tools, and app configurations. Next you customize it for your application. Finally, inject hardware-specific drivers. This step is crucial. If your image doesn’t include the right drivers for your target system, it may not boot or find the network.

Second Step: Store and Manage the Image

Once built, put that image into a version-controlled library. Teams doing this well treat image creation as part of a pipeline, not a manual task.

Third Step: Prep Your Target System

This is especially important on bare metal. Drive layouts, partitioning, and hardware quirks all matter. Boot and get control of your systems, then setup partitions to receive the image.

Fourth Step: Write and Boot the Image

Write the image to the system, set the boot partition, and restart into the cloned environment.

Fifth Step: Post Provisioning

Give each server a unique name, credentials, and any further specialization you need.

If your golden image is clean and your deployment is well-prepped, you’ll save serious time in your provisioning cycle.

Why It’s Hard

Image deployment is great for speeding up your provisioning, but you have to avoid the biggest pitfalls.

The main pain point is hardware variability. Unlike VMs, real servers are inconsistent. The age, manufacturer, and network type of your hardware will all impact the ability of your image to attach to your disk. If your image doesn’t include the right drivers or boot logic, it will fail.

We see this mistake all the time. Teams build an image in a VM, try to deploy it to bare metal, and the image fails to boot properly.

To fix this, inject drivers during the image build process to match your target system. This means testing images against your actual hardware mix, not just virtual sandboxes. This is where traditional image deployment tools like Curtin often fall short. Curtin assumes you have a perfect image-to-hardware match. Any mismatch and the process breaks.

Our Approach: Eikon + Digital Rebar

At RackN, we built Eikon to handle the problems Curtin faces with image deployment. Eikon understands multi-vendor environments and integrates directly with Digital Rebar for provisioning workflows. It handles detection and partitioning automatically, and it’s simple to set up configurations for different hardware vendors. For more on Eikon, read our blog post about it.

We’ve helped enterprises replace slow, fragile scripted installs with reliable image-based pipelines. This consistency speeds up provisioning and improves scaling significantly.

Take the Next Step with Image Deployment

Image deployment isn’t just a smart move, it’s a necessity for modern infrastructure teams managing real hardware. If you’re hitting walls with scripted installs or are tired of inconsistent builds, it’s time to upgrade your process.

We can help you do it right. Contact us and we’ll walk you through our comprehensive image deploy processes and help you get them set up in your environment.