If you have not SC Virtual Machine Manager, you have no access to VM Template to deploy standard virtual machines. But SC Virtual Machine Manager leverages existing mechanisms to deploy and specialize Windows Server such as unattend file, custom scripts or PowerShell. The specialization of the operating system enables to configure the license key, the computer name, the IP address, the keyboard layout and so on. With a good OS specialization, you can deploy your VM in one click and when it is finished, you just have to deploy your application.

Once the VM is deployed and ready, you can also deploy automatically application with features such as PowerShell DSC. But this is not covered by this topic.

Last year I have written a topic on Starwind to create VMs from PowerShell. That enables to automate the creation process without using a GUI, either from Virtual Machine Manager or Hyper-V Manager. But a VM deployment is not finished when the VM is created but when the application is deployed. Before deploying the application, the OS must also be installed and specialized. This topic shows you the method I use to deploy and specialize a VM without a single click.

You can read the complete topic by following this link.