A systems administrator is tasked with deploying 15 identical web servers. To ensure consistency and save time, the administrator builds one master server with the operating system and all necessary applications, then creates a disk image. Before deploying this image to the other 14 servers, which of the following is the MOST critical action to perform on the master image to prevent network identity conflicts?
Generalize the image using a system preparation utility.
Update the Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) on the master server.
Clone the master server's MAC address to all new servers.
Assign a unique hostname and static IP address to each cloned server.
The correct answer is to generalize the image using a system preparation utility. Utilities like Sysprep for Windows remove machine-specific information, most notably the Security Identifier (SID). If an image is cloned without generalization, all resulting servers will have identical SIDs, which causes significant authentication and network management problems, particularly in a domain environment. While assigning unique hostnames and IP addresses is also necessary, these actions occur after deployment and do not resolve the underlying SID conflict, which is the most critical issue to address before cloning. Updating the HCL is a pre-installation task, not part of the cloning preparation. Cloning the MAC address would cause severe network conflicts, as MAC addresses must be unique.
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