Upgrading VMware templates monthly. Automating this process

Question

I am a programmer on my school's internship. At my company, at the end of each month, we have this VMware product which lets you make virtual machines. You can deploy these virtual machines using templates you can make. At the end of each month, someone usually has to "convert each template" into a virtual machine and then upgrade Windows Security inside them and then close the template. This takes quite a bit of time as we have around 10 templates. I am fairly new but I have coding experience so I was wondering if there is a way to automate this process?\

I found this article but due to my lack of experience it doesn't make much sense to me.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/systemcenter/en-US/c940b797-0b40-4a2e-87a6-6c6927ba6dd4/automatically-apply-windows-updates-to-a-vm-template

In the above article, my post of interest is:

Please take a look at Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool 2.1 - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc501231.aspx

To keep the templates up-to-date, you can have a corresponding stored VM in SCVMM library. Use offline servicing tool to install software updates and then clone it and create new template with the updated image.

I don't know if the above is a faster method because this is my first time working with virtual machines. Can someone point me to the right direction?

Answer 1

With a combination of powercli and the vmware sdk (you need to native mount the vmdk to a windows server). If I remember correctly the sdk has a windows based vmdk mount tools so via powercli mount the disk then you run DISM against this offline vm, dism allows offline updating.. Not a trivial task but it can be done. I did this many years ago so I don't remember all the details. So I'd google dism offline line update and vmware sdk mount vmdk this should give you enough of what you'll need to cover this.