Liam Head: Hyper-V Templates for SharePoint 2010 using Sysprep

I’ve decided on a very simple farm for my first attempt at virtualising SharePoint 2010 at home – I’m creating 4 servers.

Server 1 is a domain controller. I’ll reuse this server over and over again. So once it is set-up, I’ll take a copy of the virtual hard drive. In the case I need to start from scratch, I can. I’ll allocate the DC 512meg RAM as this is the Windows Server 2008 R2 minimum spec, and it’s not exactly going to be taxed controlling a domain of 4 servers.

Server 2 is a SQL Server. Again, I’m likely to reuse this server, so I’ll take a copy of the VHD. I’ll allocate 4096meg RAM to this server

Server 3 and 4 are web and app servers respectively. Again, 4096meg RAM each.

Creating multiple servers is actually pretty easy in Hyper-V.
- I started by creating a single server running Windows 2008 R2, and installed all the latest updates, service pack 1, and enabled things like remote desktop.
- Next I shut down the VM I have just created, and logged in to the host and took a back-up of the VHD. This will be useful later when I need to update my base image (or, potentially, install things like a virus scanner by default)
- Next, restart the VM. Once in windows run the sysprep utility. As it turns out, sysprep comes with Windows these days and can be found at C:\Windows\System32\sysprep
- I selected the following options;

Selecting generalize ensures a new SSID is created each time the image is used so the machines don’t clash.
- Sysprep will do its thing, and then shutdown the machine. At this point, take a copy of the VHD and mark it as read-only. This is your system template
- I copied the VHD 4 times, one for each server I wanted created. Then I created 4 new VMs, each attached to one of the copied VHDs with the appropriate amount of RAM and fired them up.