About Guest Operating System Profiles

Article
01/17/2008

In a virtual environment, a guest operating system is the operating system that runs on a virtual machine, in contrast to the host operating system that runs on the physical host computer on which one or more virtual machines are deployed. In Virtual Machine Manager, a guest operating system profile is a collection of operating system settings that can be imported into a virtual machine template to provide a consistent operating system configuration for virtual machines created from that template. Alternatively, you can configure guest operating system profile settings directly on a template when you create (or later modify) the template.

Guest operating system profiles and templates are stored in the library catalog in the Virtual Machine Manager database. You can use Library view in the Administrator Console to create, view, or modify either a stand-alone guest operating system profile or a profile that is part of a template.

You can create a guest operating system profile based on default settings or based on an existing guest operating system profile. If you specify no options other than the name of the profile, Virtual Machine Manager creates a default guest operating system profile.

A guest operating system profile contains the most common configuration settings from Sysprep.inf, which is the unattended answer file for the System Preparation Tool (Sysprep.exe) used for deploying a large number of computers (including virtual machines) with the same configuration.

A Virtual Machine Manager guest operating system profile includes the following Sysprep.inf settings:

Computer name
Full name
Organization name
Administrator password
Product key
Time zone
Workgroup
Domain
Domain user
Domain user password
Answer File
[GUIRunOnce] Commands

If you import a guest operating system profile into a template, you can change the settings on either the guest operating system profile itself or on the template. Any changes to the template settings do not affect the stand-alone guest operating system profile, and vice versa. Nor do changes made to the guest operating system profile or to the template affect any existing virtual machines that were created earlier by using the template that includes this guest operating system profile.

About Guest Operating System Profiles

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