Lab Ops 2–The Lee-Robinson Script

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In my last post I mentioned how Marcus Robinson & had adapted PowerShell scripts by Thomas Lee to build a set of VMs to run a course in a reliable and repeatable way.  With Marcus’s permission I have put that Setup Script on SkyDrive, however he has a proper day job running his gold partnership Octari so I am writing up his script for him.

Notes on the script.

Unattend.xml is the instructions you can give to setup the operating system as it comes out of SysPrep. Marcus has declared the whole unattend.xml file as an object $unattendxml which he then modifies for each virtual machine to set it’s name in active directory, the domain to join it to, its fixed IP address and its default DNS Server

He makes use of functions to mount the target VHD and then copies in the modified unattend.xml and then dismounts it.  Overarching this is a create-VM function which then incorporates these functions to create his blank VMs with known names and ip addresses. However these VM are not started as their is as yet no domain controller for the other lab VMs to join

LabSvr1 in the script is gong to be that domain controller so the first thing to do is add in the AD-Directory services role and here not the use of the PSCredential PowerShell object to store credential and convert-to-secure-string for the password so that the script can work securely on the remote VM’s.  Starting the VM requires a finite amount of time so Marcus checks to see when it’s alive.

Marcus then has a section to install various other workloads all from the command line Exchange, SharePoint and my favourite SQL Server.  Before he can install some of these he has to install prerequisites such as the .Net Framework 3.5 (aka the NET-Framework-Core feature) and do that he puts in the Windows Server install media. Having installed SQL Server he can then copy in the databases he needs and here I might have attached them as well as SQL has PowerShell to do this..

$sc = new-object System.Collections.Specialized.StringCollection
$sc.Add("C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10_50.MSSQLSERVER\MSSQL\DATA\Mydatabase.mdf")
$server.AttachDatabase("myDataBase", $sc)

Anyway there’s lots of good stuff in here, and I’ll be using it to make my various demos for our upcoming IT Camps, now that the Windows 8.1 Enterprise ISO is on MSDN subscriptions.