Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Interviews and Server 2008r2 vm templates

I had a great interview with the folks over at Urban Robotics last week. They build custom 3d terrain mapping software, which is processed and stored on a custom cluster/ZFS box. The staff their is just amazing, all weekend I have had this just "too good to be true" feeling. Needless to say I can't wait to hear back from them :).

Tech notes: I recently had to rebuild my lab due to a series of hard drive failures. I was not happy, but it was my own fault in the end. (What do you mean skimping on a controller to pass through to my AIO ZFS VM was a bad idea? Haha, lesson learned- do NOT pass a bunch of discs through as individual data stores and then use them for ZFS. ESXi does NOT like this.) I decided to deploy a template for my Server 2008r2 VMs this time to make my life a little easier. In the mean time, I moved everything to my ZFS box and am awaiting hardware to replace the failed components.

This guide lays out basic template creation- I used it recently when setting up our production enviroment and was very happy with how well they laid everything out. Warning there is basic scripting involved :p.
You will want to decide what is needed in your environment. Example- I decided to not separate my page file, as I do not have a separate LUN for pagefiles in my environment.
Also- I found that when it came time to run sysprep, I could only get it to recognize my unattend.xml if I naviated to the c:\windows\system32\sysprep and then ran sysprep.exe /generalize /unattend:unattend.xml

Here's to a great week! :)

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