As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
Information handling systems are typically provided with machine-specific information that is unique to each given information handling system. Examples of such machine-specific information includes Linux KickStart files, ini files, configuration files, and autorun files, batch files, etc. Specific examples of information handling systems include remote servers that are employed in a cloud computing environment to deliver computing resources (e.g., applications, data storage, processing) over the Internet to local information handling systems. In such a cloud computing environment, moving workload images from one server system to another server system has become a routine task. During movement of such information, machine specific information can hinder a system from operating properly if blindly cloned to other systems. In a heterogeneous environment having both virtual and physical operating characteristics, the conventional handling of such machine-specific information is mainly through agents running on the operating systems or virtual machines of individual information handling systems. In any case, in-band operating system (OS) involvement is required to remove machine-specific information from a given system and to reinstall machine-specific information to the same system when a new workload image is installed to the given system. This conventional practice typically leads to “agent-sprout”, i.e., required steps of installing agent, running agent, updating agent, un-installing agent, etc.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds