It’s been a bit quiet lately, some holiday time and most importantly a change of jobs! As of July 1st I now work for OSC as an Infrastructure Specialist and will hopefully have more time to expand my knowledge and share this with the community.

The last few weeks I’ve been busy playing around with a solution in order to quickly create a Lab with VM’s.

While I know how to manually set them up and create machines, I had a somewhat ‘ideal’ method in mind and didn’t really want to stray from that idea.

First of all, I always prefer my lab to have the same layout and tend to use the same solutions, since they’re either best practice or the most logical approach for me. Now in a Lab environment, this starts at the basics, creating a folder structure to put everything in, from VHDs, VMs to ISO files and templates.

Requirements

For my Lab I always want it to have the same folder structure.

Requirements

In one of the upcoming installments of my VM Lab series, I will create a template VHD file, which will need to be set to Read Only in order to prevent changes to be made accidentally. In another, I will need to copy a current Unattend.xml file, check if it was set to Read Only and if it was, remove that value so we can customize the contents.

So far I’ve created the folder structure which we will use to store our ISO files, VHD files [including template VHDs and Unattend.xml files] and VM’s. In order to manipulate the ReadOnly status of various files [such as the template VHD’s and Unattend.xml files], I’ve provided simple functions which will assist us.

Now we need to make sure that the final piece of the infrastructure is ready: the Hyper-V VM Switches.