Thursday 14 January 2010

A fresh SBS 2008 Soon To Be Clustered VM Install And The AnswerFile

We just finished installing SBS 2008 into Hyper-V on the 1U management server that is a part of the Hyper-V clustering setup that will be installed at our client site starting tomorrow.

Once we have the cluster Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 nodes configured on the SBS 2008 domain, we will shut SBS 2008 down, export it, and import it to the cluster and make it highly available.

This is what the base OS install looks like after a successful install:

image

The above close to 14GB is before WSUS has had a chance to synchronize and start pulling down any updates too.

The SBS_AnswerFile.vhd is a 128MB VHD file created in Windows 7 (previous blog post) and attached to the secondary IDE controller on the newly created SBS VM setup in Hyper-V.

We mount the SBS 2008 OS ISO using Virtual CloneDrive (freebie – download site) on the Windows 7 machine and create the needed Answer File. From there, we save that Answer File to the SBS_AnswerFile.vhd.

We have tried mounting the VHD containing the Answer File via IDE and SCSI bus and have had no issue with either. The SBS 2008 set up routine sees the Answer File on either bus.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

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