Infrastructure as a service cloud development

There a similarities and differences in working with Windows and Linux virtual machines on SmartCloud Enterprise.  To provisioning a Windows virtual machine follow the same provisioning wizard in the SCE web portal that you do for Linux virtual machines.  However, after you have created it you will connect to it with Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) instead of SSH, as you would with Linux.  RDP is a secure, high performance protocol. To open a remote desktop to your Windows virtual machine select Remote Desktop Connection from the Start menu under Accessories.  The Remote Desktop Connection dialog is shown below.

 

 

 

To transfer files to the virtual machine, map a drive using the Remote Desktop Connection dialog before you connect.  You can set this using the Options drop down in the dialog and then changing to the Local Resources tab and mapping a drive.  The dialog is shown below.

 

 Transfer files by mapping a drive using the dialog for local devices and resources

 

More details are given in the Working with your Windows instances section of the SCE User Guide.

 

Start-up logs are not available for Windows images and image import / copy is not supported for Windows as it is for Linux.  There are also a some additional steps and configuration settings to be mindful of when working with Windows.  This can make it harder to debug when you are customizing a Windows image.  Therefore, it is good practice to keep running instances for important images alive until you can verify that captured images are able to be used for provisioning new virtual machines.  Be careful to follow the steps listed in the section Working with your Windows instances of the SCE User Guide and chapters 3 and 4 of the Customizing Image and Software Bundles Reference.

 

Lisa Seacat DeLuca summarizes the differences and similarities of working with Windows virtual machines and describes techniques for automation in her developerWorks article Customize SmartCloud Enterprise Windows-based images:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/cloud/library/cl-customwinimages/index.html

 

Windows PowerShell can be a useful scripting tool when customizing Windows images.  There is a extract-parameters.ps1 script provided in SCE Windows images in C:\Windows\System32 folder to extract provisioning parameters from the parameters.xml file.