Generating and Distributing a Virtual
Hard Disk
Creating a Virtual Hard Disk
After you have prepared a virtual hard disk for
cloning, you need to create a virtual hard disk of
your master installation with a disk-imaging tool
and save the virtual hard disk to a permanent
storage location. You can use a third-party disk
imaging software or a Microsoft technology called
iBIG. If you are using a third-party product, refer
to the accompanying documentation on how to create
and distribute a virtual hard disk.
Startup Media
Before you can load virtual hard disks on
destination computers, you need some kind of startup
media to boot your computers from. Startup media
contains the system files and device drivers that
are necessary to start a computer so that the
primary hard disk is accessible but not in use.
Startup media might also contain network adapter and
network drivers, CD and DVD device drivers, disk
configuration tools, and scripts or batch files. You
can use a floppy, CD, DVD or network boot as your
startup media, depending on the capabilities of your
destination computers.
If you use third-party disk
imaging products, they often provide tools to create
different startup media. Otherwise you need to
create your own.
Follow these guidelines when creating your
startup media:
| • |
Your startup media must
provide network support if you are
distributing virtual hard disks across a
network. |
| • |
Your startup media must
provide CD or DVD device support if you are
distributing virtual hard disks on media and
you are using a floppy disk as your startup
media. |
| • |
Your startup media must
support the tools you need to copy a virtual
hard disk from a storage location to a
destination computer. For example, if your
startup media is an MS-DOS startup disk then
you need to use MS-DOS tools to copy the
virtual hard disk onto the destination
computer. |
For more information about choosing and creating
startup media, refer to the Microsoft Windows Server
2003 Corporate Deployment Tools User's Guide (Deploy.chm).
Deploy.chm is included in the Deploy.cab file in the
Support folder on the Windows Server 2003 operating
CD.
Distributing Virtual Hard Disks
After an image (or images) has been created and
placed on a distribution share (or distribution
media such as CD or DVD) and you have a startup
media to boot your destination computers, you are
ready to distribute the images to destination
computers.
You need to make sure that your cluster
hardware and networks are set up as described in the
Windows Advanced Server 2003 Online
Help/Availability and Scalability/Cluster Servers.
All of your cluster nodes that you will be
installing already have to be connected to the
shared storage.
You can load virtual hard disks to all of your
cluster nodes simultaneously. Many third-party tools
support multicast image distribution. You can also
use iBIG to distribute virtual hard disks to your
cluster nodes.
After you have distributed virtual hard disks to
destination computers, sysprep runs Mini-Setup.
After Mini-Setup finishes, you should verify that
all of the nodes have successfully joined the
cluster. Open NLB Manager to see which nodes
participate in the cluster, and whether everything
is up and running. If it is, your cluster is ready.
