How do I deploy multiple virtual machines at a time?

Question

What I need to do is create a virtual machine template and deploy up to a hundred copies of it at a time. I don't care if this is done in Hyper-V/SCVMM, VMWare ESXi, Xen or VirtualBox, as I can work with any of them. I have yet to find a way to deploy more than one image at a time. Any Suggestions?

Answer 1

There are about a zillion options here but what is most vendor agnostic is simple PXE + minimalist kickstart + a SCM system like puppet or chef. You can also use a copy on write OS template rather than PXE for the initial setup but past that it's useful to go with a SCM system to handle all your custom configuration instead of constantly dealing with managing disk images.

Answer 2

Learn programming or a scriptable language.

Hyper-V is scriptable. Like totally scriptable. This means anyone worth 10 cents for administration can write scripts to deploy images from a central share and configure the VM and start it, and the result is distributing this script to all the boxes, which - again - any 10 cents worth admin has the tools for in place (some enterprise system control package, like - for Hyper-V - SCCM / SCOM).

It is not that complicated to set up a VM. Copy virtual image file / create delta disc file, then set up VM etc. - for Hyper-V about a page of code, two if you have a lot of complicated settings.

Answer 3

Can the virtual machine's filesystem be read only? If so, in xen/kvm (probably all hypervisors) you can have a base image that all the VMs boot off of with read only access. You just need to create a config file for each host. So for example you have one base image: /mnt/base_hvm/system.img, and a bunch of config files that look like this:

disk = [ 'file:/mnt/base_hvm/system.img,hda,r' ]
memory=4096
vcpus=2
name="host45"
vif = [ ' ' ]   #By default no n/w interfaces are configured. E.g:  A default hvm install will have the line as vif=[ 'type=ioemu,bridge=xenbr0' ]
builder = "hvm"
device_model = "/usr/lib/xen/bin/qemu-dm"
vnc=1
vncunused=1     
apic=1
acpi=1
pae=1
serial = "pty" # enable serial console
on_reboot   = 'restart'
on_crash    = 'restart'

Then you can start as many machines on that one image as you want. You could mount some empty file images for each writable /tmp /var/tmp that you want to provide individually to each system for write access as you want.

Answer 4

• Windows Deployment Services (multicast deployment, 1000's of PCs via PXE boot at once was used for TechEd AU in 2009
• VMware Lab Manager (pricey!)

... I could go on, but ig you could provide more information about budget, etc it would help a lot