Practical Cloud Knowledge: Install, Configure, and Manage - Deploying and Managing a Cloud Infrastructure - page 184

operating system profile, a hardware profile, and one or more virtual storage devices,
which, when combined, create a full virtual machine, containing the same parts as that of
a tangible physical machine. End users who must do self-servicing in terms of provisioning
must use specially assigned templates when creating these virtual machines. Usually, users
can request a template of a specific configuration if they want to customize their virtual
machines.
The exact steps for creating, importing, or exporting templates may be a bit different
depending on the cloud platform being used, but the process flow remains largely the same
for most systems.

Creating a virtual machine template out of an existing virtual machine
will destroy the source because the Microsoft Virtual Machine Manager's
(VMM's) Sysprep.exe process will strip, so to speak, the virtual machine of
its computer identity. Therefore, it is advisable to clone the source virtual
machine first unless it is no longer required and thus can be retired.

Creating Virtual Machine Templates

A virtual machine template can be created from an existing virtual machine or from a
virtual hard disk, so it is important that the virtual machine be already configured properly
since all of its settings will be carried over to the template. Exercise 7.1 walks you through
creating a template from a virtual machine, and Exercise 7.2 will show you how to create
one from a virtual disk.

E XERCISE 7.1

Creating a Template from a Virtual Machine in Microsoft VMM
This exercise sheds light on how to create VM templates in Microsoft Virtual Machine
Manager using an already existing virtual machine. First, the following conditions must
be met:

Since this is about VMM, the virtual machine must already be managed by VMM and
not another distribution of hypervisor from a different vendor.

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The virtual machine must be running a guest OS of Windows Server 2000, 2003,
or 2003 R2.

■

The source virtual machine must have Virtual Machine Additions installed on its
virtual hard drive containing the operating system.

■

The source virtual machine must already be deployed on a virtual machine host and
run by the virtual server .

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