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Create your Server Core (Sysprep) image on Hyper-V and SCVMM

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Recently i've been doing alot of "stuff" using Hyper-V and SCVMM in my home lab.

When creating an SCVMM template for Server Core, one of the most important tools you must have is Core Configurator. See https://coreconfig.codeplex.com/documentation. Once you have a server template in SCVMM you can quickly create new VMs from it. For my next steps i'll work on building a runbook automation layer in order to wrap a business process workflow around the creation of VM images, using SystemCenter Opalis Integration Server.

(I should say as a general caveat here, the ideas i'm speaking of here are geared towards building testing environments, and may or may not be suited to production uses...)

Core Configurator will give you a mini-GUI environment to help with getting your server core machine fully configured - TCP/IP address, join a domain, etc.  The first time you run CoreConfigurator it will install Powershell and the.Net framework into your server core environment using the approrprate OCSETUP (Package Manager) commands. So its best to get all this stuff primed into your Server Core image before you create your SCVMM template. What I've done is:

  1. load the CoreConfig ISO image into my VM
  2. Copy all the files into a new directory C:\CoreConfig
  3. Run Start_CoreConfig.wsf, this will initialize the process and present the main dialog window as shown in the figure below.

 

So what can we do with Server 2008 R2 Core?  The following server roles are supported:

  • Active Directory Certificate Services
  • Active Directory Domain Services
  • Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
  • BranchCache Hosted Cache
  • DHCP Server
  • DNS Server
  • File Services
  • Hyper-V
  • Media Services*
  • Print Services
  • Web Services (IIS)

for deployment / imaging / sysprep purposes many of the server roles should be installed post-Sysprep. For additional information you'll want to review Sysprep Support for Server Roles.  The short answer here is that you cannot install any of the Active Directory roles until after your Sysprep-based image is instantiated. Notably, what you can build into your Sysprep'd image includes Hyper-V, File and Print, and Web Server.

Lastly, i've had some issues getting my server core builds activated. According to KB 555965 all you need to do is run:

To activate Windows Server 2008 Core; Write the command in the Windows shell: "cscript C:\windows\system32\slmgr.vbs -ato" and press the "Enter" button. is

From my experience it hasn't been as easy as all this. i'll do some more testing and post a follow-up article on that.

Now i can close this blog posting with a pithy quote:

Experience teaches only the teachable.   -- Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1963)