Patent ID: 7600005

Claim:
A system for provisioning a plurality of heterogeneous operating systems on a plurality of target hosts comprising: a single operating system (OS) profile model for maintaining OS information about a selected OS of the plurality of heterogeneous operating systems; a first target host model for maintaining information about a first target host of the plurality of target hosts, wherein the first target host model is separate from the single OS profile model and is OS independent; a second target host model for maintaining information about a second target host of the plurality of target hosts, wherein the second target host model is distinct from the first target host model, and wherein the second target host model is separate from the single OS profile model and is OS independent; a plurality of pluggable hardware services accessing the single OS profile model and configured to: identify the selected OS from the plurality of heterogeneous operating systems for provisioning on the first target host and the second target host; activate a deployment service corresponding to the selected OS; configure a boot server corresponding to the selected OS to provision the selected OS according to the single OS profile model to create a configured boot server; provision the first target host by: setting dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP) parameters on the first target host according to the first target host model; loading, on the first target host, an initial boot kernel obtained from the configured boot server using the DHCP parameters on the first target host to obtain an installed operating system on the first target host; booting the first target host with the installed operating system on the first target host; provision the second target host by: setting DHCP parameters on the second target host according to the second target host model; loading, on the second target host, the initial boot kernel obtained from the configured boot server using the DHCP parameters on the second target host to obtain an installed operating system on the second target host; booting the second target host with the installed operating system on the second target host; wherein provisioning the first target host and the second target host uses the same single OS profile model, wherein each target host of the plurality of target hosts is a physical computer system in a data center.