Specifications

Best Practices for Virtualizing and Managing Exchange 2013
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 Guest operating system profile: A guest operating system profile defines operating system-
configured settings that will be applied to a virtual machine created with the template. This profile
defines common operating system settings, including type of operating system, roles and features
to be enabled, computer name, administrator password, domain name, product key, time zone,
answer file, and run-once file (Figure 40).
Figure 40: System Center 2012 SP1 Virtual Machine Manager – Guest Operating System Profile
On their own, however, these profiles are not enough to be classified as a template. A template contains a
number of other key elements that help to accelerate the deployment of new virtual machines into the
infrastructure. It is important to note that templates are database objects stored in the library catalog of
the VMM database; they are not represented by physical configuration files. Templates can be created as
follows:
 From an existing virtual hard disk or template stored in the library.
 From an existing virtual machine deployed on a host.
Best Practices and Recommendations
One of the easiest ways to create a new template is to generate a new, blank virtual machine with
the desired hardware settings; install the chosen Windows operating system; install any relevant
updates or patches; and, once complete, shut the virtual machine down.
An administrator can then use the VMM Template Creation wizard to transform this “gold virtual
machine” into a new template. (If you want to keep the original, make a clone of the gold virtual
machine before the template creation process.) Once VMM has finished creating the template, it
will store the relevant files in the library. The administrator can then begin deploying new virtual
machines from this template.