Patent ID: 8832679

Claim:
A method comprising: receiving, at a provisioning server device, a registration request from a computing system that is separate from the provisioning server device, the registration request to register the computing system with the provisioning server device; requesting, by the provisioning server device from the computing system, configuration information of the computing system, wherein the configuration information comprises elements comprising at least an architecture bit-size support indicator of the computing system, an instruction set type, a processor type, a manufacturer identifier, and a virtual machine extension support indicator of the computing system that represents whether the computing system supports virtualization of hardware of the computing system; receiving, by the provisioning server device from the computing system in response to the request, the requested configuration information of the computing system; storing the received configuration information as a configuration profile for the computing system; determining, by the provisioning server device, a plurality of software components that are compatible with the computing system, the plurality of software components maintained by the provisioning server device and stored separately from the computing system; matching, by the provisioning server device, two or more characteristics of the plurality of software components determined to be compatible with the computer system to two or more elements of at least the configuration information in the configuration profile; selecting, by the provisioning server device, one or more of the plurality of software components that are compatible with the computing system based on the matching, wherein the one or more of the plurality of software components can be selected without a one-to-one correspondence between all of the characteristics of the software components and all of the elements of the configuration information in the configuration profile; and providing, by the provisioning server device, the selected software components to the computing system, the providing further comprising, for each of the selected software components, indicating which of the elements of the configuration information of the computing system match the characteristics of the selected software component.