Of course, your point about triple booting and such is valid, though in those cases, you might could also consider running the Windows machines as guests inside Linux — making them the odd thing out.
This doesn’t really solve any problems with your iMacs though — because of their hardware locking. Unfortunate, I actually do like OS X… but mostly just for a desktop, it is not so friendly as a development environment.

Though for machines that didn’t have to run on OS X, running Windows as a virt guest might make things easier. I would rather prefer to pretend it didn’t exist

I guess the real question is why you need the Windows machines and the Macs The college setups I’ve seen didn’t dual boot — Linux machines pretty much ran Linux. Life would definitely get better if you eliminated that, then you don’t have the fun of maintaining the uber-triple image.

If you have the Macs and have to use them, though I’m not happy with it entirely, I’d almost be tempted to get Virtual Box or something working there and use them as hosts. The sucky part there is you have an extra layer in front of using the actual terminal and such.

If I have a Mac setup, I’d almost rather be SSH’ed into a VM rather than having to use those consoles, though you could do that in virt too.

I don’t manage “data-center” machines but rather lab machines in a college environment. All of the computers in each lab are all the same.

Making one “golden image” does take time… it takes just as much time as customising a single machine post kickstart install. In our labs we do have a considerable amount of third party software that has to be added (BlueJ, Greenfoot, Matlab, etc) that would take a bit of effort to automate via kickstart post-install scripting… rsync perhaps.

I’m not trying to say that kickstart isn’t better in some scenarios but for me, where I have triple-boot machines (PCs – Windows XP, CentOS 5.3, and Fedora 11 ; iMacs – OS X, Windows XP, Fedora 11).

I use a few external USB drives and partimage. For Mac OS X I use their Disk Utility app to create an image and to restore it.

Kickstart can only do Linux whereas imaging lets me do multiple ones. On machines with just Linux and not much in the way of third-party apps, I would definitely consider kickstart.

I’m so glad I wasn’t the guy who had to create the images where I worked, but I did discuss the process with him. What a mess! He had to create at least one image per hardware configuration, of which there were at least 3 at a given time. Not to mention, we upgraded about 1/3 of the computers a year!

On top of that, another thing that kickstarts can do that imaging cannot is automated software installation and configuration for any programs you need. There were some Windows programs that, for whatever reason, could not be part of the image, so we had another guy whose job was to package those in MSI format so they could later be installed after the imaging process was done. So slow and painful, and the work could have been done by one part-time employee with kickstarts!

I’d personally kickstart those as well and manage them in the same way (probably running config management manually rather than checking in periodically, in the case of laptops). Hundreds is not that many, and the same reasons about being able to make changes apply. You could just use straight kickstart. Maintaining the images adds to management overhead, and the Stateless project ideas that are /probably/ needed for this sort of thing really aren’t actively evolving: https://www.redhat.com/archives/stateless-list/2009-June/msg00001.html . I think most people have realized the extra complexity really isn’t needed. In the case of schools, reinstalling machines on a regular basis is fairly standard for Windows systems, but if we’re talking Linux, simply offering it up as a PXE menu option should be sufficient. Then you can just put home dirs on the network or whatever you want.

I don’t have much thin client experience… there is K12 LTSP and such, though I have never really encountered thin clients in the wild so it seems that solution is not that commonly used. At this point computers capable of running a desktop are pretty cheap so I think that has a lot of bearing on it.

Mike,

That is great