An administrator can use PowerStore snapshots and thin clones to create operating-system gold images. Use a gold image to deploy additional severs without having to stage the operating system from scratch each time.
Gold images provide the following benefits:
- Saves time: Quickly provision new servers with minimal reconfiguration required.
- Saves storage space: Only new data written to the thin clone consumes space on PowerStore. Unchanged data resides on the source volume.
- Ensures consistency: Each new server provisioned has the same initial configuration as the gold image.
Follow these steps to configure a Windows Server boot-from-SAN gold image:
- Create and map a PowerStore volume to a Windows host server or Hyper-V server (use LUN 0) that supports boot-from SAN.
- Install the operating system.
- Install the wanted roles and features such as the Hyper-V role, failover clustering, and MPIO.
- Configure the server, including MPIO.
- Patch the operating system.
- Power off the host to place the operating system in a consistent state.
- Take a manual PowerStore snapshot of the volume and select No Automatic Deletion. Use an intuitive name so it is easy to identify the purpose of this snapshot later. Use this snapshot to update the gold image with patches or other changes.
- Power on the server and run the Microsoft tool Sysprep. Select the options Generalize, Out-of-box Experience, and Shutdown. Click OK.
- Allow Sysprep to complete, and the host will shut down.
- Manually create another PowerStore snapshot of the volume.
- As before, select No Automatic Deletion.
- Add a description to make it easy to identify the purpose of this snapshot.
- Select the snapshot. Click More Actions > Create Thin Clone Using Snapshot.
- View the thin clone in the volumes list under Storage.
- Map the thin clone to a new host as LUN 0.
- Boot the host and allow the initial startup process to complete.
- Customize the server configuration as needed.
Note: The PowerStore appliance and node that owns a volume also owns all snapshots and thin clones (children) that are associated with the volume. A PowerStore resource imbalance might occur if many thin clones are created from the same source volume.