Agenda

• Intro
• The host
• Creating new VMs
• Using custom scripts
• DSC Resources
• Using DSC push and pull configurations
• Alternatives

Motivation

I quit my day job in London in 2005 and started travelling No Laptop to work with (too heavy) USB drive to store photos on Often no network connectivity Still needed to get some work done Secure way to connect to servers and online banking

Around the world

The host

Hardware

I am using Windows Server 2016 as a host OS, it boots like a Windows To Go system from an external USB (2 or 3) drive. We can use any normal SATA SSD drive and an USB-3 adapter, we could also connect the drive internally via SATA.
The host PC needs to have a 64bit CPU with Hyper-V support, the more memory the better.

New Installation

Using a PowerShell script, I can set up a new Windows To Go installation with basic setup is about an hour.
As this is for testing and evaluation purposes, we can use the 180 day trial version of Windows server.

Posh Profiles

Using a command line interface to start my Windows programs since the early 1990s, now using PowerShell profiles.

ex, um, dm, vm, ev, ser, word, n, code, ise, vs, sql, su

Creating new VMs

Hyper-V and Hyper-Cmdlets

Setup-OS.ps1

Setup-iis.ps1 -role -hacon

Setup-DemoWebServer.ps1 -iis -sites 5

Setup-AD.ps1 -prepare -forest -SiteName Singapore

Configuration MyServer {

    Node Localhost {

        File BinFolder
        {
            Ensure = "Present"
            Type = "Directory"
            DestinationPath = "C:\bin"
        }
    }
}

Get-DscResource | Select Name