Sharing a vhd with your friends!

Problem:

Today, I was attempting to set up another dev with a vhd which contained our dev enviroment.  I could not get him to boot into the vhd.  I had it working on my box but could not get him up and running.  I was stumped.  I found a technet article by Chris Avis.  Chris does a great job explaining the whole process.  It was good review material but not really anything new until I hit the part about reusing your vhd with other users.  The key was running sysprep.  This takes out machine/profile specific information from the the vhd.  It gives the new user the OOBE (Out of the Box Experience) when they start the vhd the first time.  It also allows the vhd to make specific changes required for the box where it is now running.

Solution:

Now that we have a completely built Windows OS with everything we want installed, we are going to sun SYSPREP to create a distributable package that can be used for Boot to VHD.

1 ) On the virtual machine, run SYSPREP with administrative privileges

Windows 8.1/10/2012 R2 – Click Start, type CMD, right click CMD, select Run as Administrator
Windows 12/2012R2 – From the Start screen, type CMD, right click Command Prompt, select Run as Administrator (bottom of screen)

This will open a CMD prompt window and drop you at the c:\windows\system32 directory

2) Change to the \sysprep directory and run SYSPREP.EXE

3) Select the following options for SYSPREP

System Cleanup Action:  Enter Out-of-Box Experience (OOBE)
Check the “Generalize” box
Shutdown Options:  Shutdown

When you click OK, SYSPREP will remove the current user profile, set Windows to run the Out-of-Box experience on startup (will ask for very basic information on startup), and best of all…..Stop the clock on the trial version!! How long SYSPREP takes is dependent on the speed of the host you are working on, and what applications you installed to Windows. Usually it takes no more than 5-10 minutes for SYSPREP to complete and shutdown the virtual machine.

Source:

1. ) http://blogs.technet.com/b/chrisavis/archive/2013/05/03/boot-to-vhd-configuring-creating-a-reusable-trial-version-image-and-more.aspx
2.)http://fetchmytip.blogspot.com/2015/10/how-to-enable-virtualization-on-hp.html