In this paper, we present DeployWare to address the deployment of distributed and heterogeneous software systems on large scale infrastructures such as grids. Deployment of software systems on grids raises many challenges like 1) the complexity to take into account orchestration of all the deployment tasks and management of software dependencies, 2) the heterogeneity of both physical infrastructures and software composing the system to deploy, 3) the validation to early detect errors before concrete deployments and 4) scalability to tackle thousands of nodes. To address these challenges, DeployWare provides a metamodel that abstracts concepts of the deployment, a virtual machine that executes deployment processes on grids from DeployWare descriptions, and a graphical console that allows to manage deployed systems, at runtime. To validate our approach, we have experimented DeployWare with a lot of software technologies, such as CORBA and SOA-based systems, on one thousand of nodes of Grid'5000, the french experimental grid infrastructure.