How to sysprep a Virtual Machine

Came across this fantastic article on how to sysprep a virtual machine:

http://blogs.technet.com/megand/articles/357570.aspx

This is really helpful because for a while now me and my team at Neudesic have been wanting to create a nice library of sysprep'ed VMs to have on hand for when we need them. I got this working as far as just sysprep'ing a Windows Server 2003 VM, but I have yet to try it with a server with WSS or MOSS installed. When I get around to this I will try to post a part II to this entry with the results (and if there are any sneaky things that need to be done to make it work right).

Set Path for stsadm.exe

I am sure this is nothing new or amazing, but another little thing that has kind of bugged me was always needing to point my command window to the SharePoint BIN folder to get at stsadm.exe to run SharePoint commands and such. Back in the day I would’ve just edited my machine's autoexec.bat and added a SET PATH command to the BIN folder so that it would always be available – but those days are long over ;-)

So after doing a little bit of searching around I figured out how to add a SET PATH in Windows Server 2003. It’s really easy...

1. Open up the system properties window (Right Click My Computer > Properties)
2. Click on the “Advanced” tab
3. Click on the “Environment Variables”
   
   
4. In the “System variables” list, find and select the item named “Path”
   
   
5. Click "Edit"
6. In the “Edit System Variable” window, in the “Variable value” field add a semicolon at the end as a separator and add the path to the SharePoint BIN folder:
   
   C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN\
   
   Note: be sure to add the semicolon “;” after the last path and before the new
   
   
7. Hit OK in all the windows and you should be good to go. If you open up a command window and type stsadm you should be able to access it without having to go through the trouble of navigating to the SharePoint BIN folder.
   
   

App Pool Recycle Command

So one thing I have been wondering for a while now was how I can just recycle an application pool used by a SharePoint web application rather than execute a full iisreset. After you deploy a feature or make any number of configuration changes you need to often times recycle the app pool used by the web application – running iisreset does this, but it also recycles every application pool and takes a solid 80% longer than just recycling a selected app pool.

Anyway, thanks to Ted Pattison in his awesome Inside WSS 3.0 book and I found this extremely helpful command:

cscript c:\windows\system32\iisapp.vbs /a "[App_Pool_Name]" /r

Note: be mindful to not forget the /r at the end :-)

Just replace [App_Pool_Name] with the name of the app pool you want to recycle and you should be all set. Also, what is nice is that you can add this line into a batch file and execute it as a post complication script in Visual Studio so that after compiling and deploying a feature the reset will go much faster than with iisreset, speed things up a bit.

Moved to Phoenix!

Yes, it has really been quite some time since my last post -- lots of crazy thing have happened in the last few months. I got a great new position at the Phoenix office of Neudesic, LLC a top-notch Microsoft partner based out of Irvine, CA as Principal Consultant & Regional Practice Manager of the Information Worker practice. Also, I moved down to Phoenix from Seattle which was a much bigger thing that I anticipated. But nevertheless am really happy down here with the position and the way things have turned out.

I apologize to everyone who has posted questions and comments in the last couple of months that I still haven’t responded to -- I hope going forward to be a lot more active!