It was introduced to have a compliance and supported versions based images of Windows and Linux OS across all countries.

What is a Golden Image?  

A golden image is a pre-configured template for our OS. A golden image may also be referred to as a clone image, master image, or base image. If you have ever built a standard image for your user-base, you understand the need for consistency and ease of deployment. A golden image provides just that for our deployments.

The golden image streamlines the creation and management process our recommendations, standards and best practices deployment.

Benefits of Using a Golden Image

Below are three of the main benefits of using a golden image.

Saves Time 

Golden images allows us to deploy couple of enterprise OS (Window and Linux) via remote access from virtual machines and VM cloud setup based on a single base image.

As a result, whether you deploy 5, 10 or 100++ hosts, they are all consistent. In addition to consistency, it also saves you time. As accelerated approaches grows from the project teams anytime, (with no heads up at all) we need to deploy a reliable and security compliance image for both OS (Windows and SLES) from the hosts (Esxi hosts) will be created from the same base image.

Reduce Errors

When you try to manually configure 2 or more hosts with the identical applications and patches, you are introducing the opportunity for operator error. It is really easy to overlook one small detail that can cause future errors on a few or all session hosts. By using a golden image, we can reduce our chance of errors.

Consistency

In addition to saving time, golden images can also ensure consistency by eliminating the need for repetitive configuration changes and performance tweaks. Furthermore, golden images can be configured to adhere to corporate security and compliance requirements, hence ensuring all enterprises OS’s deployments generated by the images adhered to those policies too.

Golden Image Best Practices

By having a golden image, we can build an update and upgrade patch management cycle to promote all 3 benefits mentioned above here. The suggested approache to build an base image will be coming from the single source and will transferred via file transfer (for VMWare) using the image generated with the .OBF file. This has been proved effective as most of the image we’ve created for SLES in VM were being transported using the .OBF file with the significant involvement of Boyet whom the expert from Manila team to execute it. This expertise will be expanded with the help of our experts as well from across all countries counter-part.
This will be done as well via VM Clouds (Azure Cloud) with the recommended approach perspective by cloning the Base Image as a “Golden Image”.

Here is the initial plan of implementing the Base Image per country. I’ve assigned a buddy system to serve as a contact point for each country.
We will be collecting the progress updates of each assigned tasks per country provided the agreed Target Dates of the implementation.
We may now start checking and reviewing the provisioning of the Base Image “Golden Image” per assigned country. The team meeting will be announce in a group chat.
But we want it to be a productive meeting so we should have a significant updates and progress when we have a meeting.
We will track each progress from the POC on a twice in week basis for the updates and discuss some challenges and help items to get some team resource to help out.
Please be advise that this for the initial implementation for now, this is more on the VMs provisioning for VMware and VM Clouds, we’re not requiring huge number of manpower to implement it.