virtual machine deployment

I am interested in other's responses as well. We have thought of a few
different ways to do this but don't think they are worth the legwork…yet. We
have a terminal services farm setup already and each machine is dual-booting
with a Parallels VM pointing to the Boot Camp partition. So this isn't
something big we are concerned with, just another option for the users.

We have thought of the following NO USER INTERACTION methods. The idea being
they can pull down a VM from Self-Service and just run it and be bound to AD
and be getting policy etc. at any time they want without a tech having to
touch it.

These are our ideas:
You can sysprep XP with a wildcard for the system name to generate a -$RAND
and append it to the computer name but then you lose your naming convention.

With Vista and 7 you can pre-populate the OUs with the computer names you
want and have sysprep do a secure bind and get the name from AD with a
unique identifier (ie MAC address) for the system but that is a ton of work
ahead of time.

Ryan M. Manly
Mac OS X Expert
Glenbrook High Schools
1835 Landwehr Rd.
Glenview, IL 60026
(847) 486-4948

So, nobody currently deploys say a Windows VM in Virtual Box or a
commercial VM software package?

I guess I am going to just try a few things and see where it goes...

-Tom

I am not sure if you have already seen the documents below, but I think they
may help address your questions for deploying virtual machines.

JAMF offers a white paper that covers Packaging and Deploying VMware Fusion
with Casper Suite:
http://www.jamfsoftware.com/libraries/pdf/white_papers/VMware_and_CasperSuit
e.pdf

VMware has a Mass Deployment of VMware Fusion document:
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/Mass_Deployment_of_VMware_Fusion_wp2.pdf

-- Jason D. Halvorson