Creating Profiles and Templates in VMM Overview

VMM provides the following profiles:

• Hardware profile—A hardware profile defines hardware configuration settings such as CPU, memory, network adapters, a video adapter, a DVD drive, a floppy drive, COM ports, and the priority given the virtual machine when allocating resources on a virtual machine host.
  
  
• Guest operating system profile—A guest operating system profile defines operating system configured settings which will be applied to a virtual machine created from the template. It defines common operating system settings such as the type of operating system, the computer name, administrator password, domain name, product key, and time zone, answer file and run once file.
  
  

Templates are database objects stored in the library catalog of the VMM database. Templates are not represented by physical configuration files. Templates can be created as follows:

• From an existing virtual hard disk or template stored in the library
  
  
• From an existing virtual machine deployed on a host
  
  

Note that creating a template can destroy the virtual machine used as the template’s source because Sysprep strips the virtual machine of its computer identity. If you want to continue to use the source virtual machine, clone it before you create the template.

System Center 2012 – Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) introduced the concept of services, which includes a new template type — a service template, and a number of new profiles. Service templates overcame some of the limitations of regular templates, including:

• Service templates can be used to deploy multiple virtual machines. Regular templates can be used to deploy a single virtual machine only.
  
  
• In addition to the standard building blocks of virtual hard disks, hardware profiles, and operating system profiles, service templates can leverage additional profiles including:
  
  
  • Application profile—Application profiles provide instructions for installing Microsoft Application Virtualization (Server App-V) applications, Microsoft Web Deploy applications, and Microsoft SQL Server data-tier applications (DACs), and for running scripts when deploying a virtual machine as part of a service.
    
    
  • SQL Server profile—SQL Server profiles provide instructions for customizing an instance of SQL Server for a SQL Server DAC when deploying a virtual machine as part of a service.
    
    

For more information about service profiles and templates, see Creating and Deploying Services Overview.