TPMfOSD vs TPMfOSD Embedded Edition

Sometime back, I wrote an article about various Tivoli Provisioning Manager products and their functionality. However, that was not enough. Now there is another product called Tivoli Provisioning Manager for OS Deployment Embedded Edition and there seems to be some confusion about what it does and the manuals do not seem to address this question. This article addresses the difference between TPMfOSD and TPMfOSD Emebedded Edition.

A little history

TPM for OS Deployment product line is based on the acquisition of Rembo Technology. And Rembo had two products, viz. Rembo Auto-Deploy and Rembo-Toolkit. IBM rebranded them as TPM for OS Deployment and TPM for OS Deployment Embedded Edition respectively.

Auto-Deploy and Toolkit

Auto-Deploy is a complete product that provides easy to use functionality. It has a graphical user interface to perform all the OS management functions interactively.

Rembo Toolkit is meant for power users. It has APIs that will let you do OS management programatically and customize it suit your environment. Toolkit does not have any GUI. The Rembo toolkit aka TPM for OSD Embedded Edition is now installed as a component of Tivoli Provisioning Manager to natively perform OS management functions.

To sum up, to perform stand-alone OS management via GUI, use TPM for OS Deployment. If you are a power-user and want to perform stand-alone OS management programatically, use TPM for OS Deployment Embedded Edition. If you want to use OS management with in TPM, go with Tivoli Provisioning Manager (TPM).

Hope this clarifies.

Here is an interesting thread that discuss more about Auto-Deploy and Toolkit.