I just posted a new video to delltechcenter.com on the virtualization demos page. It is a demo of how Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manger 2008 (SCVMM), which is currently in beta, can be used to clone a Hyper-V virtual machine. This was fun to put together because this is the first chance I've had to work with SCVMM 2008.

There were a couple of surprising things that I discovered around the cloning demo. The first was that a VM must be prepared in advance by running sysprep (at least for windows VMs) before doing the clone. With VMware Virtual Center it is possible to have the sysprep and other customization done as part of the clone. The second surprise to me was that Windows Server 2008 includes sysprep. In the Windows\system32\sysprep directory it is there waiting to be run. And when it is run there are only a couple of very simple options to pick from. I think that it is a much easier tool to use this way. With previous versions of Windows Server the sysprep tools were on the installation cd in a deploy.cab file, which meant you had to track down the cd. I like it better just included with the OS install - although I wonder if this is a potential problem.

In addition to the Hyper-V clone demo, Scott also put up a cool demo of SCVMM managing some VMware ESX Servers and VMs. So you might want to check them both out while you are there. We're going to talk about these demos in today's chat on Hyper-V Management.

Todd