I am rolling out a new server at work this week. It is running Windows 2003 Enterprise and it will have 2 virtual machines on it, one for WSS and WSUS. When I first got it going the first update was Service Pack 2. I installed SP2, no big deal but it does turn RIS in WDS. Everything seemed ok, so next I built the firstVM, base image and got it patched.
Now I want to just image the first VM so I don’t have to reinstall and what not. The easiest way is to Sysprep shutdown, make a copy the vhd as your base image. You can then create a differencing disk from this image or just copy the VHD to a new filename and use the new file. I chose the later so I can easily move the VHD around to different machines.
I also wanted to test WDS, because I could. So I got WDS running on the host machine, put the boot.wim and install.wim into WDS.
Now how the heck do you capture an image?
Searched the internet, found out you need to right click on the boot image and create a capture image. Did that, then add it into the install images. The machine boots then asks to capture the image. It will ask you where you want to copy the image.
You can’t send it directly to the server when you create it, if you try that option, you can’t click finish. Microsoft claims this is to protect it from data coruption. I only had one partition in my vm, so it wanted to save the image to the same partition I was capturing. I didn’t bother creating a second partition to store the image to, so I went with just copying the VHD file. I’ll try this again with the computers in the library once I move ther server over.
Here is the technet forum link I found for capturing an image.