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Service Templates in VMM 2012

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As VMM 2012 is almost complete, I started to upgrade to the RC Version.  I thought I’ll share some of my learnings:

A major new feature is Service Templates, here’s my first use of it:

Here is a VM template to deploy a single virtual machine, as we already know it from previous VMM versions.

 

With this VM Template you can deploy one new VM each time you deploy his template, and once it is deployed, you cannot modify the instance for this VM anymore.

Here comes a new concept of VMM 2012 – Service Templates. 

Among lots of other features, like grouping multiple VM’s, it also keeps track of instances created from this Service Template. So once you modify the Service Template, you have the option to automatically make the same modification to already deployed instances.

For example, you have 20 VMs created from a Service Template, and you decide to give it more physical RAM, you simple modify the Service Template and assign the new Version to the Service Instance. All 20 VM’s are modified at once.

So it’s a recommended best practice to wrap even a single VM Template into a Service Template.

Here’s how:

In Library View, click on “Create Service Template”. This will open the Service Template Designer, and the New Service Template

Give the Template a Name,  a Release Version and select  Blank Template, and later simply drag the VM Template into the Service Template.

 

 

Click “Save and Validate” and you are done with Version 1.0 of your Service Template. Now instead of deploying the VM Template, you deploy the Service Template.
Later, when you modify the Service Template, you need to give it a new version. You can then go to the Deployed Service and choose “Set Template” to send changes to the deployed VM’s

 

 

 

I used that to deploy a RDS (Terminal Services) Farm, and realized that now, as the VM is contacted by VMM2012 trough the new VM Guest Agent, VMM needs appropriate credentials on the VMM. So my learning was to add the VMM service account to the administrators group of my VM’s!

Cheers

Robert