Guidelines to build a greadt virtual machine

Building a great Virtual Machine
By Kim Oppalfens
http://scug.be/blogs/sccm/archive/2008/03/20/building-a-great-virtual-machine.aspx

Domain Name and Passwords should be keyboard agnostic (ie: be the same on azerty/querty )

• Domain Example: Contoso.net
• Password Example: Topsecret

The lab layout should be set as the background image, like in the screenshot

The lab should contain the lab credentials set with bginfo

The saved parameters file and the windows background should be saved to a folder called c:\bginfo

Create login script with saved bginfo parameters file to run as login script.

The machine should allow you to shutdown/ restart from the ctrl-alt-del box

The welcome page should be disabled

System restore should be disabled

The shutdown event tracker should be disabled

password complexity should be disabled

Changing the computer account password should be disabled.

Screensaver should be disabled

Showing icons on the desktop should be disabled (you didn't spend all this time on building backgrounds to have them cluttered with icons)

All passwords should be configured to not expire

Vm's should be running on the latest service pack

Your last login should be with the user that the people will need in the lab so that it is prefilled when pressing ctrl-alt-del

the c:\drive should contain a folder called buildguide and an rtf file with the steps taken to create the vm, this way you can see what preparative action has been taken to make the labs work.

So I created my lab environment in visio and saved the different visio's as bmp's

And set a lot of the above options using a gpo, I backupped the gpo and saved it. The gpo can be found here:http://scug.be/files/folders/sccm/default.aspx

And you could obviously import it back on any domain controller using gpmc.