Pular para o conteúdo principal

Q: What’s your Windows template approach?

Q: What’s your Windows template approach?: "

Once upon a time, I was a Windows Server administrator. Most of my focus was on Windows Server deployment and management. VMware virtualization was a large interest but my Windows responsibilities dwarfed the amount of time I spent with VMware. One place where these roads intersect is Windows templates. Because a large part of my job was managing the Windows environment, I spent time maintaining “the perfect Windows template”. Following were the ingredients I incorporated:


















































Applications
Adobe Acrobat ReaderAdvanced Find & ReplaceBeyond Compare
DiskeeperMS Network MonitorMS Resource Kits
NTSEC ToolsLatest MS RDP ClientSymantec Anti-Virus CE
MS UPHCleanVMware ToolsWindows Admin Pack
Windows Support ToolsWinzip ProSysinternals Suite
Windows Command ConsoleBGINFOCMDHERE
Windows Perf AdvisorMPS ReportsGPMC
SNMP


















































Tweaks
Remote Desktop enabledRemote Assistance disabledPagefile
Complete memory dumpDIRCMD=O env. variablePATH tweaks
taskmgr.exe in startup, run minimizedSNMPDesktop prefs.
Network icon in System TrayTaskbar prefs.
C: 12GBD: 6GB
Display Hardware acceleration to Full*
* = if necessary


VMware virtualization is now and has been my main focus going on two years. By title, I’m no longer a Windows Server administrator and I don’t care to spend a lot of time worrying about what’s in my templates. I don’t have to worry about keeping several applications up to date. In what I do now, it’s actually more important to consistently work with the most generic Windows template as possible. This is to ensure that projects I’m working with on the virtualization side of things aren’t garfed up by any of the 30+ changes made above. Issues would inevitably appear and each time I’d need to counter productively deal with the lists above as possible culprits. As such, I now take a minimalist approach to Windows templates as follows:











Applications
VMware Tools






























Tweaks
C: 20GBVMXNET3 vNICActivate Windows
wddm_video driver*Disk AlignmentDisplay Hardware acceleration to Full*
* = if necessary


In large virtualized environments, templates may be found in various repositories due to network segmentation, firewalls, storage placement, etc. As beneficial as templates are, keeping them up to date can become a significant chore and the time spent doing so eats away at the time savings benefit which they provide. Deployment consistency is key in reducing support and incident costs but making sure templates in distributed locations are consistent is not only a chore, but it is of paramount importance. If this is the scenario you’re fighting, automated template and/or storage replication is needed. Another solution might be to get away from templates altogether and adopt a scripted installation which is another tried and true approach which provides automation and consistency, but without the hassle of maintaining templates. The hassle in this case isn’t eliminated completely. It’s shifted into other areas such as maintaining PXE boot services, maintaining PXE images, and maintaining post build/application installation scripts. I’ve seen large organizations go the scripted route in lieu of templates. One reason could simply be that scripted virtual builds are strategically consistent with the organization’s scripted physical builds. Another could be the burden of maintaining templates as I discussed earlier. Is this a hint that templates don’t scale in large distributed environments?


Do you use templates and if so, what is your approach in comparison to what I’ve written about?


Post from: boche.net - VMware Virtualization Evangelist


Copyright (c) 2010 Jason Boche. The contents of this post may not be reproduced or republished on another web page or web site without prior written permission.

Q: What’s your Windows template approach?


Related Posts

"

Comentários

Postar um comentário

Postagens mais visitadas deste blog

Improve Windows Security By Closing Open Ports

Improve Windows Security By Closing Open Ports : " A standard Windows operating system has a number of ports open after installation. Some of these ports are needed for the system to function properly while others might not. These ports can pose a security risk as every open port on a system might be an entry point for a malicious user. A port basically allows communication to or from the device. Characteristics are a port number, an IP address and a protocol type. This article will give you the tools at hand to identify and evaluate the open ports on your Windows system to make a decision in the end whether they can or should be closed or left open. Software programs and tools that we will use: CurrPorts : Available for 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows. It is a port monitor that displays all open ports on a computer system. We will use it to identify the ports and the programs that are using them. Windows Task Manager: Also used to identify the programs and link some p
Postar um comentário
Leia mais

Diagnosing a Blue Screen of Death Error in Windows

Diagnosing a Blue Screen of Death Error in Windows : For many years now the famous Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) has been the ultimate indication that something disastrous has happened to make your computer die, but how useful is the information in the BSoD and the respective crash dump file that Windows produces? The best article I ever found explaining the BSoD in depth is here on the Microsoft website, however it’s quite technical and doesn’t discuss how to actually troubleshoot a problem. The crash dump file is just technical details of what was being held in the computer’s memory at the time of the crash, and this will include details on every driver and service that was loaded, and every piece of software that was running. The most useful pieces of information are to be found on the BSoD itself and are highlighted on the screenshot below. These are the BSoD error name, the stop error code and the name of the driver or service that has failed (this last one might not always appea
Postar um comentário
Leia mais

Use BGInfo to Build a Database of System Information of Your Network Computers

Use BGInfo to Build a Database of System Information of Your Network Computers : " One of the more popular tools of the Sysinternals suite among system administrators is BGInfo which tacks real-time system information to your desktop wallpaper when you first login. For obvious reasons, having information such as system memory, available hard drive space and system up time (among others) right in front of you is very convenient when you are managing several systems. A little known feature about this handy utility is the ability to have system information automatically saved to a SQL database or some other data file. With a few minutes of setup work you can easily configure BGInfo to record system information of all your network computers in a centralized storage location. You can then use this data to monitor or report on these systems however you see fit. BGInfo Setup If you are familiar with BGInfo, you can skip this section. However, if you have never used this tool, it takes ju
Postar um comentário
Leia mais