VMware Virtual Machine Template - Windows Server 2008 R2

Update: 2013/03/29

Virtual Machine Template
Virtual Machine Templates come in very handy when you want to have a repository of Virtual Machine base or images that you can easily create a virtual machine from. This saves you the time of installing/configuring the operating system, installing regular common applications and patching the system.

Here are a few references I found to create my Windows Server 2008 R2 Template on a VMware environment

Create, Install and Config

• Jason Samuel - How to Build a VMware vSphere VM Template for Windows Server 2008 R2
• VMPros Blog - VMware: My favorite Windows 2008R2 template configuration
• Jeremy Waldrop's Blog - How to Build a Windows 2008 VMware ESX VM Template
• Shawn Ross IT Blog - Creating a Windows Server 2008 R2 (x64) vSphere 4.1 VM Template
• Effin Blog - Creating an Activated Windows Server 2008 R2 VMware Template using Microsoft Sysprep
• Solori - In-the-Lab: Windows Server 2008 R2 Template for VMware
• Abiquo - VM Template Guide
• Abiquo - Generating VM Templates

Performance and Tweak

• Citrix  - CPU and Power Tweak
• Fix Slow Mouse on Windows Server 2008 Guest Os

Cloning Windows Server 2008 R2 - Use Sysprep (no more NewSID)

Source

It is not uncommon for system administrators to clone virtual servers or take an image of physical servers running Windows Server 2008 these days. There are plenty of tools to do that these days (Ghost, Acronis, Platespin for P2V conversions, etc.) If this is something you do regularly then you won’t be unfamiliar with Sysprep or NewSID, but according to Mark Russinovich at Microsoft, the SID doesn’t matter and Sysinternals have now retired NewSID (written by Mark). NewSID isn’t supported in Windows Server 2008 and the only option now is to use Sysprep. Whilst the facts presented on Mark’s blog are correct, I have personally seen many issues cloning or imaging Windows Server 2008 machines that haven’t been cloned with Sysprep first. Let me present a typical scenario that would cause problems here.