The Soul of a Virtual Machine : Sysprepping a virtual machine
I learned how to do this at TechEd 2004 in a lab led by Robert Larson, one of our resident Virtual Server gurus. You can create a “base†virtual machine with the operating system and applications you want, and then copy its .vhd file to use for other virtual machines. When you do this, it’s important to run a tool called Sysprep on the base virtual machine. That way, when you start a virtual machine that uses a copy of the base virtual machine’s .vhd file, the guest operating system will be assigned a new SID, GUID, MAC address, and so forth when it starts up. This way you won’t end up with network conflicts between different virtual machines that use the same copied .vhd file.