Patent ID: 7266818

Claim:
One or more computer readable media having stored thereon a plurality of instructions that, when executed by one or more processors of a computing device, causes the one or more processors to: maintain mappings of identifiers of the computing device in profiles, wherein each profile indicates a type of functionality the corresponding computing device is to provide; maintain software configuration information; retrieve, from a network switch, a mapping of network interface card (NIC) identifiers to ports of the network switch; identify for one or more of the network interface card (NIC) identifiers, a type of network the corresponding network interface card (NIC) is to be on; generate switch configuration information based on the mappings and the identified network types; write the switch configuration information to the network switch; start a pre-execution environment on the computing device, wherein the pre-execution environment includes sufficient instructions to allow the computing device to access a staging server via a network and obtain operating system configuration information, stored in an SQL database, from a server, wherein the pre-execution environment is started prior to any network communication by the computing device corresponding to the pre-execution environment; retrieve, based on an identifier of the computing device, the configuration information for the operating system of the computing device; and install, using the configuration information, the operating system on the computing device.