It's not always easy to keep remote sites in the IT fold. To lend a hand, systems management vendor Kace this week is unveiling a virtual appliance designed to make it simpler and less costly for IT administrators to remotely provision operating systems, without bringing the network to its knees.

The new Virtual Remote Appliance is part of the company’s KBox family of appliances. It works in conjunction with a central KBox Systems Deployment Appliance (also known as a KBox 2000) to push operating system deployments to remote offices.

The existing KBox 2000 appliance lets customers do all sorts of bare-metal activity, such as lay down an operating system, deploy system images, and harvest and store operating system images in a library, says Marty Kacin, CTO and co-founder of the Mountain View, Calif., vendor.

The new Virtual Remote Appliance essentially extends those capabilities to remote sites: With the virtual appliance deployed, IT administrators can execute deployment tasks -- such as network operating system installation, disk imaging, software distribution and configuration management -- from a central location. IT can tap the company’s existing library of operating systems, disk images, drivers and applications, rather than creating new images for remote sites.

In addition, the operating system images can be stored locally at the remote site, even though they’re created and managed at the central site. “That reduces greatly the burden on the network and the remote site connectivity that’s required to do a systems deployment,” Kacin says.

By packaging it as a virtual appliance, companies can deploy Virtual Remote Appliance without having to buy new servers for their remote sites -- and without having to send IT staff to every site. A company could re-purpose an existing server at a branch office, for example.

“We don’t force you to have a dedicated piece of hardware, nor do we force you to install a specific operating system just to support our new appliance. We took a lot of care in making sure that our ease-of-use and ease-of-deployment story holds up for these remote sites,” Kacin says.

Virtual Remote Appliance is available now and included at no additional cost with the purchase of a KBox Systems Deployment Appliance. There’s no limit on how many Virtual Remote Appliances customers can deploy, says Matt Lewinski, engineering manager for the KBox 2000 product line.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.