Creating VMWare Templates: Check This List First

Template VM’s are specialized virtual machines. They’re designed to allow you to rapidly re-deploy preconfigured virtual machines, with little to no fuss. Often, however, that is not the case. I mean, who doesn’t just right click and “Convert to Template…” What that action does, is simply mark a file letting vCenter and ESX both know it’s now a template.

Clever? Sure. Useful? Almost. When you do this you better make sure your template is ready to be deployed.

Here is a quick checklist to run down for Windows VM’s that you can use:

• Set A Strong Admin Password & Document It
  The resulting VM’s will be no good if you can’t log back in.


• Make Sure Your Configured Apps Are Not Bound To The VM’s IP Address
  When deploying the next hundred, this will be a pain to fix.


• Defrag -- For Good Measure
  This one is debatable in VM’s, but is a good practice, and will help keep the template image file smaller.


• ZeroOut
  This will save you “a lot” of space as well.


• Run Sysprep
  This strips out the identity of the virtual machine, it’s SID’s and it’s computer name. This also allows you the opportunity to create an answer file to be used when redeploying the VM to make on lining it that much faster.

Blog Credit: This blog can be found at ProfessionalVMWare.com
This site is an excellent source for VMWare information. I highly recommend it.

Enable Remote Desktop Using Group Policy

I recently needed to enable Remote Desktop access to multiple computers in a domain that my company services. I had no desire to visit each computer and manually make the change, so I search Google and found a KB article on Microsoft's website detailing the steps for enabling Remote Desktop via Active Directory and Group Policy.

To use the computer's local group policy to enable Remote Desktop:

1. Click Start, click Run, type gpedit.msc, and then click OK.


2. In the Group Policy editor, click to expand Computer Configuration, click to expand Administrative Templates, click to expand Windows Components, and then click to expand Terminal Services.


3. Double-click the Allow users to connect remotely using Terminal Services policy.


• Set the policy to Enabled, and then click OK.

You can also use the following procedure to disable Remote Desktop; however, if you use the preceding procedure, the following configuration is overridden:

1. Right-click My Computer and click Properties.


2. Click the Remote tab.
   In the Remote Desktop section, click to clear Allow users to connect remotely to this computer, and then click OK.

NOTE: Remote Desktop is disabled by default on Windows XP Professional.