Deploying a system using a custom boot ISO file

PXE is a widely used way to deploy systems, and so are ISO's. PXE may not always be at hand because of security, hardware availability, and so on.

Many hardware manufacturers provide remote access to their systems without an OS installed. HP has iLO, while Dell has RIB. The advantage of these "remote" control solutions is that they also allow you to mount "virtual" media in the form of an ISO.

How to do it…

Red Hat provides boot media as ISO images, which you can use to boot your systems from. We will create a custom ISO image, which will allow us to boot a system in a similar way.

Let's create an ISO that you can mount as virtual media, write a CD-ROM, or even use dd to write the contents on a USB stick/disk through the following steps:

1. Install the required packages to create ISO9660 images, as follows:

   ~]# yum install -y genisoimage
   

2. Mount the RHEL 7 DVD's ISO image by executing the following command:

   ~...