Building an MDT 2010 Virtual Lab

For this little project I’ve picked up a copy of Deployment Fundamentals by Johan Arwidmark and Mikael Nyström.  The book details setting up a Windows 7 deployment infrastructure in a fictitious enterprise environment.  So will be using their examples to build my lab.

The first order of business, start configuring virtual hosts!  Downloaded and installed VirtualBox, which can handle x64 hosts, so I don’t have to load Server 2008 HyperV over the top of my carefully rebuilt Windows 7 system (Really didn’t want to give up my workstation for the lab environment completely, maybe one day…  when I have a Core i7 notebook…).  Time to build the Server 2008 R2 master image for the lab environment, since we will be using three or four of these systems.  Complete the install, download any patches from Microsoft/Windows Update, and then run sysprep.

The best method looks like running from the command line, a quick google search turned up this blog post by Matt Groves, http://www.mattgrovesblog.com/2009/11/sysprep-windows-2008-r2.html.  Matt notes that this command should be run from an elevated command prompt:  c:\windows\system32\sysprep\sysprep.exe /quiet /generalize /oobe /shutdown

Once sysprep is completed and the virtual machine is shut down, copy the virtual drive file to create the GOLD image.