take an existing virtual machine and turn it into a template, including generalizing the
guest operating system:
The guest virtual machine must be a supported operating system, and the
operating system in the guest must be known to SCVMM. When you are looking at
the virtual machine in the VMs And Services workspace, it should show the
operating system version. If it does not, right-click the VM and select Refresh
while the virtual machine is running.
The virtual machine must be shut down.
The virtual machine must not have any checkpoints (to save the VM, create a clone
of it first).
The virtual machine administrator password does not need to be blank.This allows you to create a virtual machine, customize it as required, shut it down, and
simply right-click it in SCVMM and select the Create VM Template option. Remember
that this will generalize the operating system, and so if you want to keep the state of
the virtual machine, you should create a clone of it prior to using it as the source for a
template creation. A warning is displayed that the template creation process will
remove the state of the VM. When creating a VM template, the virtual hardware will
copy the configuration of the source VM, but this can be changed in the Library post-
template creation. The Operating System template properties can be modified, such as
name, administrator password, time zone, and domain membership, and you can even
install roles, features, and other software. An SCVMM library server must be selected
as the target to store the new template along with a location within the library.
Once the template is created, the original virtual machine will be deleted. You can
track the status of the template creation by using the Jobs workspace in SCVMM, as
shown in Figure 5.26. Note that the longest part of the process was copying the VHDX
file to the library.
Figure 5.26 The full detail of a template creation using SCVMM
SCVMM 2012 SP1 introduced the ability to create Linux-based virtual machine
templates that could then be deployed. There is an additional step because Linux does
not have a built-in sysprep, which means that an SCVMM agent must be installed into
the Linux VM prior to using it for a template that allows SCVMM to customize the OS
during deployment. The process for Linux is as follows: