The "highest level" of bare metal deployment in a private cloud environment through system Center VMM

Objective

For a simple environment with only a few servers, deploying a basic environment, or deploying several operating systems with Hyper-V virtualization, may not be a complex task, but a complex data center or a cloud data center of hundreds of or even thousands of servers It may be necessary to expand the node as required and deploy the infrastructure environment, in which case, in addition to the need to start with the modular metal architecture itself, It also requires a powerful means of implementing a private cloud environment that is ready (simply by deploying the underlying architecture of virtualization hypervisor to a bare metal architecture). With the cloud infrastructure (Hyper-V systems that contain the Hypervisor virtualization layer), the future IaaS starts to make sense, and we can then implement the top-tier scalable infrastructure with a proprietary cloud management component combined with service templates, So this 0-touch virtualization layer deployment is a fundamental part of implementing a private cloud, which is essential.

In the past, in Microsoft's environment, we used to combine PXE (Preboot execute environment is a technology developed by Intel Corporation, working in the Client/server network mode, supporting workstations to download images from remote servers over the network. This supports the startup process of the operating system from the network, during which the terminal requires the server to assign an IP address, then TFTP (trivial File Transfer Protocol) or MTFTP (multicast trivial file Transfer Protocol) protocol downloads a boot package into native memory and executes it, and the boot package completes the terminal basic software setting to boot the terminal operating system preinstalled in the server. PXE can boot multiple operating systems such as Windows server/client, using the MDT (Microsoft deployment toolkit,http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/ solutionaccelerators/dd407791.aspx), (Wdswindows deployment services,http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ cc731439%28v=ws.10%29.aspx), and many other ways to automate deployments that typically use PXE to boot up a minimal WinPE environment and then deploy the installation image files through this environment, but these approaches have made great strides Today we take this opportunity to share with you the "highest level" of private cloud bare metal deployments designed to build our environment, through the System Center private cloud environment Component Virtual Machine Manager VMM 2012 implementation via Out-of-band management OOB (out of Band) technology implemented 0-touch automatic deployment, my experience is simple and easy to use in this way is very suitable for large-scale data center. This is an introduction to automating the deployment of the Windows Server RTM scenario through the latest system Center SP1 RC version, and I have also practiced the 2008 R2 environment, and the process is basically consistent.

Core Components Out-of-band Management

This is actually a very central part of this article; the underlying management of bare metal hardware This is an essential component, through the motherboard controller (baseboard Management Controller (BMC)) This component we can easily implement the server's underlying management, such as direct implementation console display output and keyboard mouse input, control the server's switch machine, get the server power state, collect the server hardware (SMBIOS GUID, manufacturer, model, Assettag, serial number) and other information , therefore, the use of Out-of-band management not only we can achieve the underlying architecture deployment, in the future can also implement Out-of-band power management, such as according to the data Center load dynamic control node to start and stop and other advanced functions. The current Out-of-band management is mainly composed of three standards:

SMASH (Systems Management architecture for server hardware), this IBM server uses more (Http://dmtf.org/standards/smash)

IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface), this Dell Idrac and HP's ILO server employs more (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Intelligent_platform_management_interface)

DCMI (Data Center Management Interface) standard (http://www.intel.com/technology/product/DCMI/index.htm)

Core Component Boot image

A boot image is a Windows Server 2008 R2 that is used to automatically start up with the Hyper-V role or the image of Windows Server 2012 used in this article, which is used to automatically start the VHD. For the automatic start of the VHD, TechNet has a good description of http://technet.microsoft.com/zh-cn/library/dd799282 (v=ws.10). aspx, Of course, about how I used to make this image and start the process here can be summarized as follows, the first way is simpler, the second way will be more direct also I prefer to use:

Manually install the operating system into a VHDX or VHD virtual disk in a physical environment or hyper-V, and copy the file for deployment in future libraries in VMM.

Second, install the Waik tool on the machine (if you need to make Windows 8 or Windows Server 2012, you need the latest Waik 8.0 http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx ? id=30652)

1. Create a VHDX file for startup through PowerShell in Windows 8 or Windows Server 2012 (with the Hyper-V role included)

New-vhd–dynamic–path Ws2012.vhdx–sizebyte 20GB

2. In Resource Manager by double-clicking the Mount WS2012.VHDX to an automatically allocated file system letter, such as F:

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