Apologies for the delay in getting my VMworld 2018 demo and code posted online, I know a number of you have been asking about the Windows Instant Clone samples to get an idea on how to create your own customization scripts for managing more "recent" Microsoft Windows releases 😉 and perhaps you might even consider submitting a pull request to share with the community. I have posted both the videos and code samples below. Enjoy and happy Automating!

Instant Clone Microsoft Windows

To demonstrate the power of the newly re-architected Instant Clone feature in vSphere 6.7 and to help make the point clear that the Instant Clone feature is really Guest Operating System agnostic, meaning you can Instant Clone any to Virtual Machine that can run VMware Tools, I thought it would be fun to see how old of a Microsoft OS that I could Instant Clone. After a bit of trial/error, that turned out to be Windows 98 and Windows 2000 🙂

Windows 98 Demo



Windows 2000 Demo





Code

In both the Windows 98 and Windows 200 sub-directories, there is a specific PowerCLI driver script which initiates the actual Instant Cone of the Windows VM. Before running that script, you will need to upload the run.bat script which will "freeze" and prepare the OS for Instant Cloning along with the VBS scripts (for Windows 2000 OS) to perform the actual customization.

For more resources on using the new Instant Clone APIs, check out this blog post here and here. For any VMware Cloud on AWS customers, we also have a Tech Preview REST API for Instant Clone (POST /vcenter/vm?action=instant-clone) which can be accessed in addition to the Instant Clone SOAP API. You can refer to the API Explorer for more details when connecting to your VMC SDDC.

VM Keystrokes

One very cool and powerful vSphere API that was released in vSphere 6.5 is the ability to send VM Keystrokes to a VM, which is still not something many folks are aware of. Check out the demo below on why this API can enabled a ton of interesting use cases. Please note, the VM in the demo does NOT have VMware Tools installed and the console is only displayed to show what is happening within the VM, all interactions are through this specific vSphere API.

Demo



Code

For those interested in the specific Tetris application I had used, you can find it here.