You’re reading the blog post series ”Creating a Windows 2012 VM Template with SCVMM 2012“
I find myself using the term VM in many situations. In most of them I’m talking about a virtual machine running an Windows OS. However, in fact a virtual machine is only the virtual hardware. It doesn’t have to be provisioned with an OS per se.
In this step we are going to create a blank VM, and then install Windows 2012 server on it. This shouldn’t be hard. Let’s begin!
In your VMM console in the navigation bar, click “VMs and Services”. Right click a Host (or cluster) and choose “Create Virtual Machine”.
This will launch the Create Virtual Machine wizard.
On the first page, “Select source”, choose “Create the new virtual machine with a blank virtual hard disk”.
On “Specify Virtual Machine Identity”, choose a name. I recommend WIN2012-template
On “Configure Hardware”, pay attention to the Virtual DVD Drive, Network Adapter 1 and Availability.
Virtual DVD Drive : Here you have to point to the ISO file we added in step 3a. Do not fill the checkbox “Share image file instead of copying it”. This requires additional configuration in Active Directory, which is out of scope in this guide 🙂 By default, your VM boots from Virtual DVD drive first, so you do not have to modify the boot order
Network Adapter 1: Here you should connect to the existing VM Network in your Hyper-V environment
Availability: Same as in step 2. Make your VM high available if your cluster supports this.
On “Select Destination”, choose to place the virtual machine on a host.
On “Select Host”, choose the host with most stars.
Finish the wizard. Your VM is now ready to be turned on. Right click your WIN2012-template VM and choose Power On.
At the moment that I started writing this step, I was planning to guide you to install Windows Server 2012. However, the setup of Windows 2012 is extremely straight forward (and Google Bing is always your friend), so I’d say: install Windows, complete the few configuration settings (like product key and administrator account), and move on to step 3: Customize Windows Server 2012 and sysprep
