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I have to roll out 10 windows server 2012 machines using hyper-v in my lab. I know with vmware you can use 'linked-clones'.

So that the basic installation of all 10 machines are the same, and the hypervisor only saves the delta's for each specific machine.

Otherwise I have to spend 10x the same windows server installation on disc space.

Tips and trics are welcome!

Dennis
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1 Answers1

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Hi Lectere What you need are Differencing disks. with differencing disks you would first create a parent disk that contains the OS you wish to deploy (Use sysprep to generalize it) and then when you create your differencing disks you link them to the parent. you then build VMs based on the differencing disks.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc720381(v=ws.10).aspx

Michael Brown
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  • Great answer, and I think all the OP wanted to know but I just wanted to add a tiny bit of extra geeky detail regarding VMware's Linked Clones - in that they're not just disk-diff'ing but also they do something similar with memory in that LC's benefit from shared memory pages with the original VM too. – Chopper3 Oct 06 '16 at 09:18