About

vizor is a comprehensive toolset that builds upon PuppetLabs razor-server to automate the building of Window VMs & VM images from vanilla ISOs using WinPE on the following cloud platforms

• Xen Cloud Platform
• Citrix XenServer
• Apache CloudStack
• Citrix CloudPlatform

Capabilities

• Orchestrate the building of single VMs or batches of (thousands) of VMs at a time using saved configurations i.e. keep the machine image catalogue regularly up-to-date.
• Discover and build a catalogue of Windows Installer ISOs (e.g. from a central CIFS/NFS share, etc) from which VMs can be built. ISOs do not have to be copied locally and vizor can scale VM building to many thousands of ISOs (Windows versions, editions, langugages, etc) for datacenter needs.
• Manage multiple CloudStack/Xenserver farms as (reference) platforms on which VMs can be created (from ISOs) and then templated for distribution later.
• Manage catalogues of boxes from which VMs/VMImages can be built on any of the clouds/virtualization platforms known to vizor.
• A (relatively) well designed CLI interface with organized hierarchies of subcommands, help text, tab-completion, etc make working with vizor easy.
• Automated setup of the vizor components on a debian VM.
• Support building of Windows VMs for the following Windows editions
  • Windows XP
  • Windows Server 2003
  • Windows Vista
  • Windows Server 2008
  • Windows 7 (Pro, Enterprise)
  • Windows Server 2008 R2
  • Windows 8
  • Windows Server 2012
  • Windows 8.1
  • Windows Server 2016
  • Windows 10
• Allow for overlaying language packs on top of existing box definitions i.e. reuse base box definition with multiple different language overlays.
• Injection of a Powershell Provisioning Abstraction that is able to re-use functionality from PowerShell Modules and apply that to the machine in task/sequence form until the sequence is fully complete. The sequence application is idempotent and survives multiple reboots.
• Fully automated (and extensible) end-to-end provisioning of the windows OS using the Powershell Provisioning Abstraction.
  • Windows Base OS Installation
  • Language Pack Installations
  • i18n Settings
  • Timezone and NTP configuration
  • Windows Updates (Repeated)
  • KMS License Configuration
  • Windows Activation Configuration
  • Windows Defender Definitions Updates and Scans
  • Multiple DotNet Framework Installations
  • Paravirtualization Driver Installations
  • Screen Resolution Settings (For XenServer and/or Cloudstack/Xenserver)
  • Local User Account Management
  • (User Defined) Startup Script Injection
  • Disk Defragmenter Tasks
  • Group policy (non-domain joined) definitions
  • NGen Optimization of .Net images
  • Startup Tasks Management (Scripts, Services, etc)
  • VM Image Optimizations
  • BGInfo Settings

Usage

Please refer to the doc/ directory for extended documentation on pre-requisites, installation and setup, usage, etc.

As the documentation is pandoc-generated HTML, it is best viewed offline starting at the index.

License

vizor VM builder

Copyright (C) 2012, Shalom Bhooshi

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.