VMware ESX has the ability to clone templates, and this is a great feature when using iSCSI or FC datastores. When leveraging NFS datastores however, you lose thin provisioning on those NFS datastores. One way to get around this is to use a third party imaging software.
Microsoft provides a free imaging package titled imageX. You can read about on technet from here. A quick synopsis is that, unlike other imaging software, ImageX focuses on the files instead of disk blocks. This allows ImageX to leverage a Single Instance Store (SIS). Image X will compress the first image at around 33 to 50% of the on disk size, and will store the image in a file with a WIM extension. The WIM file holds the SIS and also indexes of which blocks of data are associated with the image. The benefit of the SIS and imageX can be found when appending a second image to the WIM. imageX will create a second index in the WIM file. It will then start imaging the machine, it will find a file and compare that to the SIS. If the file is found, it will add a pointer to the new index and move on. If the file is not found, imageX will add the file into the SIS and then add a pointer in the new index and move on.
To use imagex, you will need to download the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK). After installing the WAIK, you can follow the instructions found here, on svrops.com, to create a WinPE boot CD. Before you create the CD using he OSCDIMG, you will need to inject the Network and SCSI drivers required for ESX. To do this, you will first need to get the correct drivers. You can either scour the internet looking for them, or you can just select install VMware tools from a guest VM. On the Guest VM, open my computers, Open the CDrom, program filesVMwareVMware ToolsDrivers and copy the Vmxnet and SCSI folders. Now, on the machine that you installed the WAIK on, run the following commands
peimg /inf=DRIVE:<location you copied the network driver>vmxnet.inf /image=DRIVE:<mount location of wimfile>
peimg /inf=DRIVE:<location you copied the network driver>vmscsi.inf /image=DRIVE:<mount location of wimfile>
you can also use the same commands to inject other drivers, if you are going to leverage the boot CD across other hardware also. After you’ve injected all of the drivers that you plan on, go ahead and complete the instructions found on svrops.com. Now, after the OSCDIMG command, you will have a bootable WINPE iso. One point, make sure that you when you run the unmount command, ensure that you use the /commit command. If not, all of your changes will be lost, and you get to do it again.
Image Capture
So now that you have a bootable winpe iso, with imagex and the correct drivers, what do you do. First, build a gold image(s) of Windows XP, vista, 2003 and/or 2008. Patch everything with the latest service packs, security patches, etc… Also, its best to build the initial gold image with multi processors. That way you can use the same image for single/multi processors with out needing to change the HAL. next sysprep the gold image. You can find instructions for running sysprep here. After running the sysprep, start the VM and mount the CDrom as the iso created.
After booting, you will need to mount a network share, use a command similar to: Net use m: \<servername>share.
Create a new VM manually. It doesn’t need to be identical, but ensure that the hard disks are large enough to hold the uncompressed data from the gold image. Next, boot to the ImageX WinPE iso created earlier. After booting up, you will need to run diskpart, you can find websites online that detail everything about diskpart, but to create a basic C drive, you will need to run the following commands.
Diskpart.exe
Select disk 0
Create partition primary size=<size of disk in Mbytes>
Select partition 1
Format fs=NTFS label=”Sys” Quick
Active
Now, for each additional disk, select disk <disk> and run all of the same commands as above except, change the label to a description of the drive. Also, run the active command on the sys drive. After you have configured all of the drives type exit to get back to the command prompt. From the command line, run the net use command again. Next, change to X:program filesimagex. Type imagex /apply m:<wimfile>.wim <index number> c: /verify. After the image is applied, you can rerun the imagex /apply command change the index number and the drive. After complete, unmount CDrom and reboot the VM. You should now be greeted by the Windows mini-setup.
While not as fast as VMware builtin clone from template, it does allow you to continue to leverage the thin provisioning inherent in NFS datastores. In our environments, it takes roughly 20 minutes to build a Windows 2003 VM, versus about 10 minutes to build the same VM from template.
SwRpx8 Kewl you should come up with that. Excellent!