I was asked to participate one day a week in the VBOS roll out project. The goal of this project was to replace the Windows Server 2003 infrastructure servers of over 200 regional Microsoft offices with a Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V implementation.

 Before I enrolled into the project, the intention was to get as many IT managers as possible involved, hand over documentation and let each IT manager follow the instructions in the documentation. Early on in the project it became clear to me this was not a good way to do this project, so I proposed a different solution. Instead of relying on a large number of relatively unskilled managers, I wanted to use an automation script, that would fully automate the configuration of the Hyper-V server, then install the VMs and configure the VMs, all directed from one simple GUI.

There were several complications that would hamper automation of this process:

1. Since the bandwidth of many branch offices was very limited, the push out of VMs with VMM was not acceptable.
2. The IT managers decided on the sizing of the Hyper-V server, small medium or large and the Hyper-V configuration changed, depending on this sizing. however, there was no administration of who ordered what size server for which location.

 In the weeks after that I wrote a script with a GUI, based on VBscript, that used WMI to pull the required information from the Hyper-V server, to find the Domain the server was in, figured out the size of the Hyper-V server based on disk sizes and queried for installed patches.

 Then it used PSexec commands to install the required patches, created autounattended.xml files to set the VM options.

 Next, it used Powershell to create the VMs one by one, mounting the physical DVD to avoid network traffic that copying the VMs would create, mounting floppy images to apply the autounattended file and monitoring the event log to see if the installation is finished.

 The whole process was literally reduced from days of work, to only several minutes of attention required, each server automatically installed identically to the next. I did participate in installing about 15 Hyper-V servers this way, at that point my work load became to high and although I did continue to support the script, I was no longer able to roll out the VMs myself.

Here is an image of the script GUI:

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