How do I create an image of our standard MacBook build?

If you perceive the Windows procedure to be easy, then the Mac process will be a slice of cake and a bowl or cherries. Cloning OS X is incredibly easy. There are some gotchas when new hardware is released, but in general, it is cake. There are many ways to do this.

The easiest, is a disk image clone. You have already figure out the steps. Build a machine exactly the way you want it. But don't personalize it in any way. Don't bind it to the domain. Don't create user accounts (other than admin), and remember to change the machine name to something the you will remember to change. I tend to use CHANGEME. Once you have the master image, the steps are basically:

1: Boot the master machine to its recovery partition or into target disk mode.

2: Use Disk Utility to create a disk image of the entire drive. Compressed with no encryption is usually effective.

3: Save this to a drive other than the master drive.

4: When the capture is complete, go to the images menu in Disk Utility and run Scan Image for Restore on the disk image you've just created.

5: When done, use that disk image and the Restore tab of Disk Utility to restore back to other machines. Once again, boot to the other machines recovery partition or build yourself a boot service drive.

Now, beyond this, you can get into NetRestore (requires and OS X Server), or tools like JAMF. You need more than 50 Macs for this to be cost effective.

Imaging Macs is cake. New SSD based units can be cloned in less than 10 minutes.

R-

Apple Consultants Network

Apple Professional Services

Author "Mavericks Server – Foundation Services" :: Exclusively available in the Apple iBooks Store

If you want to do NetRestore from your server "Mac OS X Deployment" by Kevin White is a good reference.

Nope. Netinstall/NetRestore requires an NBI folder. It has a network bootable OS which installs a payload on the target system. The payload, inside the NBI folder, is usually a compressed disk image as described by Strontium90.

The three main imaging solutions for Mac are

NetRestore + System Imaging Utility (both part of Server.app from Apple)

- http://www.apple.com/support/osxserver/systemimaging/

- http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5599

JAMF Imaging Suite

- http://www.jamfsoftware.com/software/imaging-suite

DeployStudio

- http://www.deploystudio.com/Home.html

I personally prefer DeployStudio (which still requires Apple's Server.app). All three solutions allow imaging multiple Macs over the network.