Rapid Provisioning Bulk Virtual Machines using SCVMM and Hyper-V; Creating Full Clones for XenDesktop or Microsoft VDI

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Over the last several years I’ve written a number of PowerShell scripts, ranging in complexity from one-liners to very complex multi-function modular packages for distribution (See the Citrix Chained Reboot Scripts for XenApp and XenDesktop for an example of one of my more complex scripts).  As I’ve discovered, scripting in PowerShell is an adaptive process, easily allowing you to take bits and pieces from a previous script to feed into the next. Well, that’s just what I’ve done with this SCVMM/Hyper-V script to create Full VM Clones for Citrix XenDesktop or Microsoft VDI. See below for a demo of the finished product:

In many cases, you may not want to use chained base image / linked cloning technologies. For example, if you’re planning to provide disaster recovery capabilities for your users full thick clones, this becomes increasingly difficult (or impossible) when you’re talking about linking differencing disks back to a master or base disk. This is also one of the challenges with the RingCube acquisition (Personal vDisk) and can become a barrier to adoption. Another scenario is when you’re using specific vendor’s storage optimization, like Atlantis ILIO or Nutanix and deduplication occurs either in-line or as a back-end process. In these scenarios, it makes more sense to have full clone persistent desktops for the operational simplicity. Unfortunately both Citrix XenDesktop and Microsoft VDI lack the ability to create full clones for persistent, both of which employ a vhdx chaining mechanism for Hyper-V.

Without further introduction, let’s actually dive into how to create the rapid provisioning script. Since this script will be very environment specific, I’ll be walking readers through how to create this, instead of providing a pre-packaged script. To start, you need a SCVMM and Hyper-V environment with a Windows virtual machine captured as a template. If you need assistance on how to get to this point, there are a lot of guides on the web, including one by my colleague Greg Shields on Tech Target: Using Virtual Machine Manager for rapid Hyper-V deployment.

One of my favorite features of the latest release of System Center is that (for the most part) wizards provided in the GUI have a “View Script” button in the corner so you can reuse the PowerShell functions for future deployments! We’ll use these script as a starting point. In my example above, I’m using local storage (Atlantis ILIO) and have all the domain join process setup so when the machines power on, they are already joined to the domain with the Citrix VDA installed, ready for production. To get started, in SCVMM right click your template, select Create Virtual Machine, enter all the details about the VM deployment, and at the end, click View Script:

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This will output a script similar to the following:

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Go ahead and save this script somewhere useful. In order to modularize this script and make it repeatable to create VMs in bulk, we’ll need to change all the unique identifiers such as JobGroups, computername, temporary template, and hardware profile.  These will be generated once for each virtual machine.

At the beginning of the script, drop the following code to create the GUID variables:

$jobgroup = [guid]::NewGuid()
$jobgroup2 = [guid]::NewGuid()
$profile = [guid]::NewGuid()
$temptemplate = [guid]::NewGuid()

There are actually two unique GUIDs for the JobGroups, so we’ll need to replace the first GUID with $jobgroup, and the second with $jobgroup2. In my example, the first JobGroup was “a728072c-64f6-468c-a73f-489c145d9580”.  A simple find and replace will replace this unique GUID with the variable $jobgroup:

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We’ll go ahead and do the same for jobgroup2, profile, and temptemplate. The first line that has the GUID for JobGroup2 starts with “New-SCVMTemplate”.  Find this line and you’ll find the second JobGroup GUID (“d7091731-5bd4-4b49-b9f1-b2e9f1854410” in my example):

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A simple find replace on this GUID and we’ll be all set:

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Next, we’ll do the same for $profile (first line starts with “New-SCHardwareProfile”). Be sure to include the double quotes when you replace this with the $profile variable:

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Next, let’s do the same for $temptemplate (first line starts with “New-SCVMTemplate”). Be sure to include the double quotes when you replace this with the $temptemplate variable:

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Finally, we’ll replace the $computername with a variable that we’ll increment as we deploy the VMs in bulk (first line starts with “New-SCVMTemplate”). Be sure to include the double quotes with you replace this with the $computername variable:

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By default it will use the same host that you selected in the wizard for each deployment. If you are deploying to local storage, take a look at the line that starts with “Set-SCVMConfiguration” as it will likely contain the path to be used for the deployments. In my case, since I’m using an ILIO iSCSI volume, I want all these VMs directed to the “I:\” drive:

Set-SCVMConfiguration -VMConfiguration $virtualMachineConfiguration -VMLocation “I:\” -PinVMLocation $true

Also, I’ve found that sometimes when doing find and replace, my variables still end up with double quotes around them. Just do a cursory search of the script to make sure none of your variables are in quotes as this will break the script. If any of the five variables are in double quotes, remove the quotes. See:

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Next, we’ll go ahead and walk through the magic of creating these VMs in bulk.  First thing you need to do is add a right bracket “ } ” at the very end of the script. This is because we will be using this entire script in a while loop:

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Next, you can simply copy/paste the following at the top of the script (above the $jobgroup, $jobgroup2, $temptemplate, and $profile variables). We’ll use this as a starting point for creating the admin dialog and loop:

ipmo ‘virtualmachinemanager\virtualmachinemanager.psd1’
[void]
[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName(‘Microsoft.VisualBasic’)
$namingprefix = [Microsoft.VisualBasic.Interaction]::InputBox(“Provide the Virtual Machine Name Prefix:”, “Virtual Machine Name Prefix”, “HVXD71W7-6”)
[int]$numberofvms = [Microsoft.VisualBasic.Interaction]::InputBox(“How Many Virtual Machines to Create?”, “How Many Virtual Machines to Create?”, “10”)
[int]$maxjobs = “5”
get-vm | sort-object Name | where {$_.Name -like $namingprefix + “*”} | Select-Object -last 1 | foreach-object {$lastvm = $_.Name.Substring($_.Name.Length – 2,2)}
if ( $lastvm -ne $null ){ $i = [int]$lastvm} else { $i = 0}
$j = $i + $numberofvms
for ($i += 1; $i -le $j; $i++) {
$running = @(get-job | ? {$_.Status -eq “Running”})
while ($running.Count -ge $maxjobs) {$running = @(get-job | ? {$_.Status -eq “Running”});write-host Sleeping;start-sleep -s 15}
$computername = $namingprefix + “{0:d2}” -f $i
write-host (get-date -uformat %I:%M:%S) “- Creating virtual machine ” $computername -ForegroundColor Green

Unfortunately the blockquote below puts line breaks in the wrong places due to word wrap. Click here to download as a text file:  SCVMM_Rapid_Provisioning_Windows7_Full_Clones_Snipit.txt

Let’s walk through each line and I’ll outline what we’re doing…

ipmo ‘virtualmachinemanager\virtualmachinemanager.psd1’

Since we want to be able to call this script from a PS1 script, this imports the Virtual Machine Manager PowerShell module.

[void]
[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName(‘Microsoft.VisualBasic’)

Load the VB assembly so we can create a dialog.

$namingprefix = [Microsoft.VisualBasic.Interaction]::InputBox(“Provide the Virtual Machine Name Prefix:”, “Virtual Machine Name Prefix”, “HVXD71W7-6”)

Present a VB dialog to the administrator to provide the VM Name Prefix. Looks something like this:

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[int]$numberofvms = [Microsoft.VisualBasic.Interaction]::InputBox(“How Many Virtual Machines to Create?”, “How Many Virtual Machines to Create?”, “10”)

Present a VB dialog to the administrator to provide the number (integer) of VMs to create. Looks something like this:

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[int]$maxjobs = “5”

Specify the maximum number of SCVMM jobs for throttling. If your hosts and array can handle more than five simultaneous provisioning actions, you can increase the number of jobs here.

get-vm | sort-object Name | where {$_.Name -like $namingprefix + “*”} | Select-Object -last 1 | foreach-object {$lastvm = $_.Name.Substring($_.Name.Length – 2,2)}

if ( $lastvm -ne $null ){ $i = [int]$lastvm} else { $i = 0}

Determine “Where we left off” and start the provisioning process from there. For example, if your prefix was HVXD71W7-6 and you already had VMs 01-10, it would start at 11 for the next VM to create. If you want to create three digits for the increment (more than 100 VMs for the prefix), change the number 2 (two places) to 3.

$j = $i + $numberofvms
for ($i += 1; $i -le $j; $i++) {

Create the upper boundary ($j) and for loop.

$running = @(get-job | ? {$_.Status -eq “Running”})
while ($running.Count -ge $maxjobs) {$running = @(get-job | ? {$_.Status -eq “Running”});write-host Sleeping;start-sleep -s 15}

Throttle the jobs to create $maxjobs (i.e. 5) VMs at a time, based on total running jobs on SCVMM. Sleep for 15 seconds and check again.

$computername = $namingprefix + “{0:d2}” -f $i
write-host (get-date -uformat %I:%M:%S) “- Creating virtual machine ” $computername -ForegroundColor Green

Create the $computername variable based on the namingprefix and current job number (for example HVXD71W7-601).  If you want to create three digits for the increment (more than 100 VMs for the prefix), change the d2 to d3.

That’s it!  If you want to compare your final script against mine, you can find my final here:

Click to Download SCVMM_Rapid_Provisioning_Windows7_Full_Clones.txt

As always, if you have any questions, comments, or just want to leave feedback, please do so below.  Thanks for reading!

@youngtech

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  1. WalterWalter06-18-2018

    How do you reset count so that it does not pick up where it left off with respect to the computer name?

  2. Joshua CJoshua C08-15-2017

    Wow worked great for me, thanks a ton.

  3. Walter ChomakWalter Chomak08-07-2017

    Thank you! worked like a charm!

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