As promised, here is a bare metal deployment in screenshots as initiated from SCVMM 2012. One thing to note is that the bare metal server must be configured to have network booting as the first option so that an unattended PXE boot can be initiated.
In part 2, I covered the steps required in VMM to initiate a bare metal deployment. The following screenshots show what happens on the bare metal server once VMM has kicked off the job.
So the first thing that the host does is a PXE boot. Once that is successful (and you may need to review this post), the host starts to transfer the boot file from the WDS server:
This allows the server to boot into WinPE:
and the VMM bare metal deployment starts:
The principle behind bare metal deployment is that VMM actually deploys a VHD rather than installing the OS onto the raw hard drive.
Once that is done, there is a customisation stage:
and the enabling of the Hyper-V role:
(Remember that this is the bare metal deployment of a new Hyper-V host because this is VMM doing this)
The install then cleans up …
and the host reboots. Although the host is configured to try PXE booting first, the WDS server refuses the PXE boot so the hardware then continues to boot to the hard drive.
From here on, it is a standard OS installation.
One more reboot …
.. and the server finally finishes with a complete installation of Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 and, in my case, ready joined to the domain.
Very painless and very fast – the above deployment took about 30 minutes.
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