SCVMM 2008 R2 and the Power of Templates

As you’ve read, I’ve been using SCVMM for a while and I still learn new things about it. I mentioned templates in my first screen cast and told you that I would talk more about them, so here they are. Templates let you create a standard virtual machine image and store it in your SCVMM library. The cool part about the template is that during the template process, the virtual machine is sysprepped so it’s ready to quickly be deployed to your environment. I’ve created a short screen cast to walk through the process. I start with my standard image, including my anti-virus and other server customizations, I then ensure the machine is fully patched from Windows Update, and then I start the template process. Once I have the template created, I then walk through deploying a new virtual machine based upon the template.

If the Video Playback window does not appear below, you will need to install Microsoft Silverlight.

This session is one part of a series of screen casts around Hyper-V, you can go to this link to access the whole series.

Here’s the home page for SCVMM 2008 R2.

Here’s the link to the Eval copy of SCVMM 2008 R2 (rtm).

Tags: System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2,Creating a SCVMM template,quick provisioning