The invention includes a method, system, and article to automatically soft configure a node, such as a compute node, in a data center. The data center may have several racks and a unit may be installed in one of the racks as the node. Each rack may be identified by a unique rack location. The data center may include various servers, devices, and rack locations tied together through a Local Area Network (LAN) mechanism. A new unit deployed within the data center may be discovered. A configuration template for the discovered unit may then be found. Based on the configuration template, software automatically may be installed no the discovered unit.