Recently Microsoft has been unveiling the enhancements that will be seen in System Center 2012 Configuration Manger.
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/system-center/system-center-2012-r2-configuration-manager.aspx
The goal of the VHD creation for R2 is to help you with VMM, having a unified approach to image creation. Now you can update your VHD by simply changing a task sequence. That's nice but what about the undocumented benifit.
Windows 8 has a hyper-V functionality. So what? Well generally you create your Corporate Image and then start pushing to hardware, some might even push it to a hyper-V server to load and allow people to look at. Well now you can cut testing time by creating a VHD, shoot it over to the VM farm for testing or maybe even just allow Win8 users to pull down the VHD, install it on their machine and run all the testing on their own virtual environment. While this is happening the Imaging team can also then work on the Hardware drivers and other items necessary for deployment. Then the real Hardware testing can be done while other are still testing the data portion in a VHD. Then you have a real world deployment and testing.
This could, in affect, quicken the testing and deployment of an image utilizing the Win8 and R2 system. Test Win 8.1 in this manor before sending it out. This way you don't even need to install it to your machine, you have the corporate image VHD created and apply 8.1 and test your applications.
Thank you Microsoft for allowing the IT professionals an easier way to test and deploy IT standards!!!!
Later we will show this in a Task Sequence.
