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When you're creating virtual machines using automation,

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before you actually do the deployment,

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you'll want to make sure that you have certain things set up properly,

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such as, I'm in the Task Manager of a host server,

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and the RAM, or memory,

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is one of the first things I like to check before I make a virtual machine.

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So you can see this particular server has 252 available GB of RAM.

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It has 320 GB total, so it's not using that much of the RAM right now.

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The other thing I want to look at is going to be the storage.

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This particular host server runs as a failover cluster,

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so that basically means that more than one server node is

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sharing the storage that you see here.

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And we can see that I have 16 TBs available and that most of my storage is free,

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so I can easily create very large virtual machines if I need to.

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Now that I know how much RAM I have and how much storage I have,

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I can go ahead and create my virtual machine.

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So I'll right‑click and choose New, Virtual Machine,

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and we get this wizard that appears.

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Now I'm going to call this one PS‑Win22,

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but I want to store it in some other place other than the default,

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so I have to check the box for storing it in a different

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location so that way it will stay highly available.

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So I'm going to go to the root of the C drive and go into my ClusterStorage.

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Now if you don't have a cluster, that's okay,

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you can just go ahead and pick the folder that you would like.

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I've selected my folder, and now I can click Next.

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I'll want to make sure I choose Generation 2.

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Generation 2 has the additional security and features that I'd like.

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Now I'll go ahead and click Next, and now we have the memory.

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If I'm choosing Dynamic Memory,

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then what will happen is it will start with a small amount of memory and

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as it needs more it will go ahead and expand; however,

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it will never run as quickly as just going ahead and

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assigning the memory that you want right away.

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I'm going to give this one approximately 32 GB of RAM, and click Next.

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Now I want to choose my Connection.

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So you should have at least one network switch connected,

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if not, you'll want to create that before getting to this step.

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And now we can see all the different information such as the name of the server,

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the location.

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The size, by default, is going to be 127 GB,

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and that's always the default for any brand‑new virtual machine.

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If I already have an existing virtual hard disk,

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I can choose that here, or I can attach one later.

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But I want to go ahead and choose this one,

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and I'm going to choose the default size.

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We can always increase that later if we need to.

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Now I need to choose the operating system. So I'm

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going to install an operating system, click Browse,

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choose my ISO file, because it no longer will accept a DVD,

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and click Next, and then click Finish.

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However, I don't want to go ahead and start my virtual machine yet.

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I'm going to need to make some changes.

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Here's my server.

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I'm going to double‑click on the server itself,

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and I can take a look at the properties prior to starting.

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So I can go to File, I can go to Settings. And we see the Memory,

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that's here, we can make changes to it, we can go higher or lower,

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we can enable the Dynamic Memory if we'd like.

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I'm going to start at the Firmware section,

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and we can see by default it's going to boot off of the DVD Drive,

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which is the ISO that we loaded.

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After that it's going to go to the Network Adapter,

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which is going to be the PXE, or pre‑execution environment,

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bootable into Windows Deployment server.

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And then finally, we have the hard drive itself.

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This Boot order is fine as long as we have a brand‑new

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installation that we want to install from an ISO file.

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However, if I want to run the PXE environment and connect to WDS,

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I'll need to have this boot from my Network Adapter instead, but

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that's not the case for this particular one,

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so I'll go ahead and continue on to the Security area.

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Enabling Secure Boot will add additional security to keep any types of

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rootkits from loading prior to my operating system.

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And I can choose a template if I'd like.

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The Windows one is the one that works best for Windows Servers.

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If I need to encrypt anything such as the hard drive using BitLocker,

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then I can choose to enable the Trusted Platform Module.

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And now you'll need to have an actual Trusted Platform Module type of

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chip on your motherboard in order to get that to work.

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If you don't, you can enable the virtual Trusted Platform Module in the registry.

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Next I'm going to go to the processor.

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By default, it's only going to allow one processor,

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and that's one of the issues with the wizard.

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It doesn't give you the option to choose more processors.

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So I'm going to go ahead and choose 8 processors.

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Now I have a total of 24.

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I could use all 24 if I'd like, however,

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I'm just going to choose 8 because it's likely it's not going to be

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able to take advantage of more than 8 anyway,

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so I won't really see any type of performance enhancement by going

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more than 8 just for a simple Windows Server.

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Now if I were to add in, say, an Exchange Server or SQL Server,

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I might want to increase that.

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If I click on the SCSI Controller, here I can add an additional Hard Drive,

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DVD or Shared Drive just in case I don't have enough

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storage for my particular server.

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I'll just click Remove because I don't need that at this time.

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Here's my Network Adapter.

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If I want,

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I can change that to one of the other network adapters that are available,

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or just turn it off altogether.

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Down below, we can see the name of the server.

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I can change the name at the top if I'd like.

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Under Integration Services,

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these are things that automatically get added in if the boxes are checked.

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So we see the Operating system shutdown can be done from the Hyper‑V Manager

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rather than going into the Windows operating system itself.

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The Time synchronization will synchronize to the host computer,

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so if you want that to happen, you can do that.

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If you would like to not have that Time synchronization happen,

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such as if this were a domain controller,

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then you can uncheck the box and then you can take the domain

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controller and sync it to a public time server.

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Now down below, we have Guest services,

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and that adds additional features such as being able to

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copy and paste in both directions.

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So instead of just being able to copy from the host to the guest,

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you can actually go back from the guest to the host,

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and there's some other nice little features as well that I like to enable.

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Checkpoints are similar to snapshots with other products such as VMware.

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As a matter of fact,

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Hyper‑V used to call them snapshots up until Windows Server 2012 R2,

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where they renamed them to checkpoints.

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Checkpoints allows us to go back in time to reboot to a

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previous version prior to a Windows update that might have

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gone bad or a virus or some other issue.

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The Smart Paging File Location is the same type of paging

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file that you would see in a Windows Server,

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for instance, where you'd see the pagefile.sys, however,

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this is specific for a virtual machine.

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And if you're doing any type of clustering,

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as I am here,

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you'll want to make sure that that Smart Paging file is in

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the same location as the ClusterStorage.

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Otherwise, if you want to move the virtual machine to another server,

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then you won't be able to do it because that Smart Paging file is

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stuck on the C Drive in a different location. However,

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if you're not clustering, then you can certainly leave it wherever you want.

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I like to go to the Automatic Start Action and make sure that we have

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the Always start this virtual machine automatically.

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However,

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you may choose to only allow it if it was running when the

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service was stopped or do nothing at all.

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Then we have the Automatic Stop option.

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We can choose to Save the virtual machine state,

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Turn off the virtual machine or Shut down the guest operating system.

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Saving the virtual machine state allows us to

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restart the server much more quickly, and it keeps it right where it left off.

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However, on occasion,

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the state will become corrupt and you'll have to delete the state in

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order to restart the virtual machine, and then you may end up losing

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some files in that particular example, however,

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in most cases it's still the best way to go.

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Setting your virtual machine to have the proper RAM,

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storage, and settings, will ensure your server's success when automating installation.