VMWare Workstation Master/Golden Image

General question.

I have been using VMWare personally for a few years now. But now I have a need to create a master / golden image of installed software to distribute to others. Since I have not done this before I figured I would come here and ask for advice.

General concept I have heard is create the new virtual machine, install controls software, then do a Sysprep of the system. Then distriute this VM and install any licneses required.

Does this sound about right? Any other suggestions or best practices?

I have done this exact thing using VirtualBox from Oracle.

I basically made multiple Windows XP machines for Siemens software, AB software, and others. I have a Windows 7 machine for AB, as well.

I don't know about VMWare, but VirtualBox takes care of the host OS integration, creating a unified environment for the virtual machines to run on. I simply zip up the virtual machines I made, move them to the new computer, unpack them, and simply add them as new machines. No SysPrep required.

To minimize the size of the machines for transfer, I defrag them and utilize sdelete from Windows Sysinternals to zero out the unused virtual hard drive space (within the virtual machine itself). VirtualBox has a compact feature (via command line) that minimizes the size of the virtual disk. I use dynamically sized disks, so the guest OS thinks that they are 50GB but it only actually uses 9GB, for example, after this procedure. As such, the zip file remains manageable.

If you are interested in checking out VirtualBox, I can post some documents explaining the procedure I mentioned and offer help with it. It is free, so it is worth checking out.

If you are sticking to VMWare, then I apologize, I don't use it, so I am useless for that.

Personally I use VirtualBox at home and have for a long time. Professionally it was recommended that I use VMWare for support reasons.

I would gladly review any documentation you have on how you currently setup your systems.

I was looking at VirtualBox again for work, but I am not sure if we would need the extension pack or not. And while it is not that expensive, the minimum quantity was like 100!

Thanks for the info so far!

I tried to license virtualbox once and oracle told me not to bother them unless I wanted to buy 500 licenses.

On the guest; I'd recommend creating a new user, making it administrator if you want. Then install the software from that account. Sysprep will wipe the built-in 'Administrator' account preferences and at first boot, post-sysprep, it won't have settings that carry over. Having them in another account will survive.

VirtualBox is free. Are you guys sure you had to buy licenses for VirtualBox and not some other software?

I would install the extension pack - I always do. What it gives you is absolutely worth it (auto resizing of screens and some other features that are no-brainers).

When you distribute the VM,s Be sure to change the Computer name to a unique name for each VM. If you have two VMs running on the same network with duplicate names you may run into issues. I am tasked with creating master VM's in my organization and learned this the hard way. Rockwell PLC,s do not like 2 PCs with the same PC name online with them.The PLC will kick one of the PCs offline.

You have the general idea use VMware to build your machine then sysprep and install licenses once deployed. For the windows install part you will also want to build an answer file.

If you are deploying these to many of the same type and model of machine it's fairly easy but if you plan to deploy to a lot of different types and models of machines then the driver part will be manual on a lot of it and can be a pain.

Depending on how many you plan to do now and in the future you may consider looking at Smart Deploy https://www.smartdeploy.com/ as it would be so much easier to do this.

The minimum license purchase for Smart Deploy is 50 licenses but it's cheap enough that it's still the better way to go even if you have to purchase a few more licenses than you need.

Take a look at their youtube channel and you will see how simple they make the process and the drivers are simply using their pre-made driver packs.

lstavropoulos said:

VirtualBox is free. Are you guys sure you had to buy licenses for VirtualBox and not some other software?

I would install the extension pack - I always do. What it gives you is absolutely worth it (auto resizing of screens and some other features that are no-brainers).

Click to expand...

Yes VirtualBox is free, but the Extension pack is free for personal and evaluation use per the license agreement (Personal Use and Evaluation License
PUEL).

https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/VirtualBox_PUEL

Thanks for all of the info guys, hopefully I can move forward with this, as long as corporate IT signs off on it.
:site:

Thank you for the heads up, Joltron. Shame on me for not paying attention to this before.

@JOLTRON - if you're trying to package and distribute software, not an entire environment/OS, you might consider trying Docker Containers.