OS Deployment of Hyper-V through SCVMM 2012 makes it very easy to turn bare metal machines into VM Hosts. The process deploys the OS and creates a consistent configuration to provide a layer of uniformity to your hosts even though there can be significant differences in hardware. It also makes it easy to redeploy if your host isn’t acting as expected.
In order to do this there are a lot of different technologies and components (IPMI, PXE, WDS, WinPE) that are working together to make this happen. Many of these components are setup and configured outside of the control of the VMM server, and if they aren’t setup correctly the process will fail. Once a good configuration is obtained, deploying multiple machines or redeploying to existing machines is very reliable.
In order to help understand where these configuration problems may be I’ve produced some helpful flowcharts to identify common problems that we’ve encountered when working on this feature.
First up is the UI for the add resource wizard. If you can’t find the computer you can’t deploy to it. This flowchart will help you through the process of understanding why discovery might fail. It will also help you to understand what options to choose in the UI:
Once you complete the add resource wizard a job gets created for deployment. If all goes well you can get lunch and when you return your host will be deployed and under management by VMM. If the job fails, that’s where the next flowchart comes in…
We welcome feedback on this process on the VMM forums in Technet . Let us know if you encountered a problem that isn’t covered here, or if this helped you to solve a problem.
Thanks!
Greg Cusanza -Program Manager-System Center Virtual Machine Manager