Working with various clients it tends to be an issue everywhere I go to a varying degree, even once software is purchased and available it still is not easy to install. Sometimes it is strictly logistical and an issue of lack of shared skills across and organization where it is expected that these things must be done manually. Whatever the case may be there are areas where automating installation of packaged software is of great value.

Enter the IBM Enterprise Deployment tools, which includes two tools IBM Installation Manager and IBM Packaging Utility. These two tools provide a range of capabilities for managing software installation media and updates as well as automation for installing to target machines in a reliable, repeatable, and automated way.

Noticing that many people aren’t aware that these exist or how to use them I wanted to put together a few posts to highlight some of these tools and how they can be used to solve a piece of the problem here and ideas how this can be integrated into a organizations operational model via technologies like Chef, Puppet, and Ansible.

The content will come as a series, what I am thinking is to break it out into a few self-contained foundational chunks where only the final advanced topics post will bring it all together:

• Part 1: Recording IBM Installation Manager Response Files for automating installations
• Part 2: Creating your own Install Repositories with IBM Package Utility
• Part 3: Hosting your Install Repositories with nginx
• Part 4: Integrating IBM Installation Manager silent installs with Chef

Reference:

• Installation Manager and Packaging Utility download links
• IBM Installation Manager
• IBM Package Utility