Method and apparatus for system description and provisioning. In one embodiment, a system description and provisioning mechanism may be provided as a component of system firmware that, during the pre-boot process of the system, may collect information about the system and represent the information in a peer-to-peer platform advertisement. The advertisement may be broadcast or multicast on the network and intercepted by a control station. The control station may assign an IP address to the new system and, based on the information in the advertisement, provision the system to the specific needs of the data center/network environment. In one embodiment, provisioning may be accomplished by issuing commands such as boot from disk and partition or boot from the network (given a particular network address) with a specific image.