As was mentioned earlier in this chapter, NetBoot is used to boot a computer to an operating system that is hosted on a network. Lion Server has a NetBoot Service that is managed using Server Admin, located in /Applications/Server. NetBoot has a few uses, including lab systems that boot from a lab server and imaging. The use for imaging is now the most prevalent use of NetBoot: because you don’t want to image either your source or your target, you can NetBoot a client to image it, rather than use Target Disk Mode.

To use Lion Server’s NetBoot Service, first create a NetBoot set. This is a disk image located inside a NetBoot bundle (a file with a .nbi extension). Once a NetBoot set has been created, it gets activated in Server Admin and voilà, you have a network-based operating system.