Homebake Toolkit - Deployment Central
Virtualization, WSS October 5th, 2008Here’s a something from my VM toolkit. It’s a homebake tool I wrote in VB6, and I’ve been using for quite a few years now.
Quite simply, the tool reads a list of configurational changes [registry changes/ scripts/ software/ installables], then you choose which ones to apply, and it goes ahead and does it. It’s run locally on the target machine, and doesn’t require or care anything about domain membership [although you can use PSexec to invoke it remotely].
I’ve used this little baby to automate the build of SQL, Exchange, Web servers, Terminal Servers and more desktops than I care to remember.
These days I find I use it mostly when authoring new VMs, and rebuilding physical hosts. It’s been a faithful way to reproduce, automate and reduce the time it takes to do all sorts of tasks — oh and it writes basic doco too!
Anyway, I’m not sure how much life is left in a tool like this, so I’ve been thinking of releasing into sourceforge/web/something.
Thoughts or comments? Ping me directly.
October 6th, 2008 at 10:42 am
Nice one Dugie, I’d appreciate a copy if you’d be so kind?
It certainly looks like a useful little tool to have in the kit bag? ;-))
Dave