The process of deployment of Virtual Private Servers (VPS) to end customers is very similar to deployment of dedicated servers.

Installing guest Operating System on every purchased VPS from scratch is time-consuming process which leads to order delivery delays (some hosting companies may setup new VPS up to 48 hours) and potentially leads to security breaches as a result of configuration errors and human factor.

The goal of every VPS hosting company is to minimize VPS provisioning time (up to several minutes if possible!), reduce administrative overhead and exclude human factor. This could be achieved by creating a new VPS from “operating system template” (OS template) once prepared by highly-skilled personnel.

In WebsitePanel (WSP) VPS solution OS template represents a set of Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) file containing “generalized” image of installed OS (and other applications) and a meta-information describing template supported features as well as provisioning options.

This guide will demonstrate how to prepare OS template ready for completely automated provisioning of customer VPS with Windows Server 2008 or Windows Vista. Provided guidance could be used as a good starting point for creation your own OS templates based on Windows Server 2008, but with additional pre-installed software and deployment scenarios.

• Overview
• Managing Hyper-V Server
• Creating “Master” Virtual Machine
• Installing Guest Operating System
• Setting up Guest OS Services and Applications
• Preparing VPS Template for Deployment
• Deploying VPS Template to Library
• VPS Guest OS Provisioning