SCVMM 2012: Preparing for Bare Metal Deployment, part 3

In the series so far:

• SCVMM 2012: Bare Metal Deployment covers what SCVMM 2012 will actually do for bare metal deployment and what infrastructure is required to support it.
• SCVMM 2012: Preparing for Bare Metal Deployment, part 1 looks at the steps required to get a copy of Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 set up as a VHD on the VMM Library.
• SCVMM 2012: Preparing for Bare Metal Deployment, part 2 looks at setting up the BMC account, defining a host profile and adding a physical host to SCVMM.

In this post, I’m going to cover setting up the WDS server that is required to support the PXE boot for bare metal deployment. Note that I’ve missed out the creation of the network definitions and I’m still planning to cover that is this series of posts … I’m just doing things slightly out of sequence .

Setting Up WDS

Please note that you must use Windows Server 2008 R2 as a minimum for the WDS used by VMM. With that said, the next step is to add the Windows Deployment Services role:

So basically you use the Add Roles Wizard and step through the default settings. After installation, go to Server Manager and expand Roles > Windows Deployment Services > Servers. You will see that the new server has a warning triangle over it because it hasn’t been configured.

Right-click on the server and choose Configure Server.

I’ve only got one drive on this server (it is a very simple VM) so I’m happy for the installation folder to be on the same volume as the system volume.

Leaving this set to Do not respond to any client computers.

Deselecting Add images to the server now because VMM will do that for itself in a moment.

So here is our finished installation of WDS:

Telling VMM about WDS

Under Fabric, choose Add resources > Add PXE Server. Enter the name of the WDS server and administrator credentials.

VMM then proceeds to set up what it needs to have on the WDS server:

When the modifications have been completed, you can run wdsutil /get-server /show:config on the WDS server to confirm that VMM has added a provider to the list:

Note that nothing done by VMM will show up in the WDS GUI. That is because the GUI only shows stuff handled “natively” by WDS, which doesn’t cover VMM.