I have worked in a lab environment that used HP RDP for the past couple of years. In this lab we test our software for compatibility and bugs. Testing is done on a wide array of servers consisting of Blades, Integrity servers (Itaniums), and regular ML/DL servers.
Business Problem:
Developing scripted install scripts for all of the various OSs and architecture types that worked on all the different machines takes a large amount of time. Also keeping track of all of the various drivers that were needed during the install is a royal headache.
This causes switching from one OS to another OS to be a manual process if you didn't have the space to keep an image of every OS type for every architecture for every machines stored on a file server (eats up space fast).
Then on machines where it is necessary to change the RAID configuration there is no way to easily switch back and forth when restoring images without touching the machine.
My Solution:
Installing the HP Rapid Deployment Pack made life a lot easier. There are dozens of HP developed jobs to cover everything from installs of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (3.x, 4.x, 5.x), SUSE Enterprise Linux (9, 10), Windows 2003 (all flavors), and ESX 3.0 server. Almost all of those had corresponding jobs for each architecture type (x86, x64, IA64). This made installing an OS on multiple different hardware types a breeze. No more worrying about if a machine was SCSI or SATA, no more finding the right NIC drivers for production, and no more dealing with unattended install files. 1 job to 50 machines, walk away and its done.
In addition to that, they even have jobs to take a snap shot of the state of the hardware. So if I needed to keep an image of a DL360 G4 configured with a RAID 5 I could do that then restore a different image to the same machine all setup for RAID 0 and I would never even have to touch the machine.
And if that wasn't enough, the RDP console has a plugin for the HP tools so you can easily access the iLO features of your severs just by right clicking the machine. This allowed for easy hardware remote terminal access and hardware power controls.
The Rip and Replace feature is also really cool. If a blade dies for whatever reason, just take it out (rip), put a fresh one in its spot (replace) then walk away and it will be fully restored and running with all the apps the original blade had in 15-30 minutes.
Return on Investment:
Implementing the RDP pack saved us many hours of researching different types of install scripts for all different OSs. It also saved tons of time as far as driver research and implementation. RDP updates regularly so it is easy to keep up with the fast paced Linux OS releases.
I easily saved double to triple my time beyond that of just stand alone Deployment Server and when you combine the two from an environment that has neither the return on investment is astounding.