Section 3.6. Summary

3.6. Summary

Building virtual machines is an interesting process that you should practice, test, and document. Once you're confident you have a good virtual machine build for a specific operating system, make a copy of it and save the copy as your Gold Master. You can use this for all future-based builds of the operating system. It will increase your turnaround time for provisioning servers, ensure the quality of the build is always the same, and immediately start realizing some of the ROI of a virtual infrastructure.

Changes to your Gold Master should be thoroughly tested and documented prior to committing the changes permanently. The easiest way to do this is to place the virtual disk of the Gold Master in Undoable mode prior to your testing so you can discard any changes that go bad.

Create a library of builds with the different operating systems you support or are testing. You can also create Gold Master virtual machines that are application specific. Store your virtual in a VMlibrary which should house all the tools, Gold Masters, ISO images, and other materials used within your virtual infrastructure.