Orange Data Centre Part 2 – Getting ready for SCVMM

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I now have hyper-V running on my shiny new Orange Dell Covet (Precision 6500) and in order to manage it properly I want to setup SCVMM next to manage it. 

 

Actually before I do that I am going to import a Virtual Machine(VM) I have already namely my Domain Controller (DC).  I have other VMs joined to this domain and  and it has some accounts I want to use to run services.  This VM uses a special type of virtual disk, a differencing disk;

  • There is a base disk (base R-enterprise.vhd) which doesn’t change and has the state of the VM up until I had installed Windows Server on it and then sysprepped it to make it anonymous (i.e. with no SSID).
  • the differences to this are stored in another VHD (DC.VHD) including the name I gave it the fact that it was promoted to domain controller and every other step performed on it.

What this allows me to do is to create another differencing disk (SCVMM.VHD) which uses the same base disk as the DC above (base R-enterprise.vhd) and this keeps down the the space on my precious SSDs.  A couple of points about my use of differencing disks:

  • export a VM will also import the base disk so you still get the whole VM as a backup.
  • the sysprepping bit is needed for two reasons multiple VMs using the same base disk can join the same domain (which is what I plan to do), and to be license compliant.

Anyway back to SCVMM.  I have created a new VM to use that SCVMM differencing disk and given it:

  • 2 of my 4 processors
  • 2Gb of base memory with the option to grow to 4Gb (using the new dynamic memory in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1).
  • 2 x NIC connecting to my internal and external virtual networks I setup last time

When I start this machine it will come out of sysprep and complete installation of the OS My next steps to prepare this VM to run SCVMM are:

  • Rename it to SCMM2008R2 and join it to my DC (contoso.com)
  • Install the application role (a prerequisite for SCVMM and SQL Server)
  • Enable remote desktop from server manager so I can get into it from another machine from where I’ll record screencasts or present etc.
  • Installed SQL Server 2008 R2 , the database engine and reporting services in native mode
  • Add the contoso\sqlservice account to local administrators.  I’ll use this as the service account for SCVMM as well as for SQL Server
  • Create a new dynamic (expanding) VHD, VMM library.VHD, which will host the library of VMs used in SCVMM (more on this later) and attach this to the SCVMM2008R2 VM.  Note: in hyper-V this VHDs con only be attached to a VM that is not running.

At this point I snapshot the machine so I can redo the installation of SCVMM if I make a mess of it or to re-demo that step.

In part 3 I’ll setup SCVMM itself no I am ready to go..