This is the second post in a series about leveraging virtualization for the purpose of hosting an Agile PLM environment. Given my need to work with the latest Agile PLM release (9.3.0.2), I thought I would make some screencasts to demonstrate how I set it up and how virtualization can help out your organization. The first post "Going Virtual with Agile PLM… Don’t Be Scared (Part 1)" provided a series overview and included the first screencast on how to create a virtual machine template of Windows Server 2008 SP1.

This post walks you through the provisioning of a virtual machine from the template created in Part 1. Templates are not required but if you ever have to create more than one virtual machine you can certainly save a lot of time by just cloning that first install to a template and then provisioning new VMs from it when required. In addition to provisioning the VM, we will also prepare the host for our Agile PLM installation.

Keep in mind I am installing this virtual machine for testing and development purposes. We do a lot of Agile Engineering Collaboration work as well as custom development against Agile. The settings I choose may not be appropriate for your environment.

Provisioning the Virtual Machine

It is incredibly easy to provision a virtual machine in VMware. Here are the steps:

1. Using vCenter in the "Inventory > VMs and Templates" view, simply right click on the template and select Deploy new Virtual Machine from this Template.
2. A wizard will open, enter a name for the virtual machine and the inventory location (the logical placement of the VM). At Zero Wait-State we have the standard of prefixing our virtual machine names with vm- and try to name the actual vm the same as the hostname at the operating system level. Because this is an Agile PLM 9.3.0.2 installation, I used the name vm-agile9302.
3. Next, select the hostname and the datastore
4. For our virtual machines, we chose thin provisioning. In the setup of our template, we did the same so we will use "same format as source"
5. On the last page of the wizard, I elect to edit the virtual hardware to add a hard disk and bump up the RAM. As expected, I use thin provisioning on the disk.
6. Once you are done with the wizard it may take a few minutes to provision but it is definitely faster than installing Windows again.

Preparing the Virtual Machine

Now that the VM is ready to work with there are a few things we need to do:

• TAKE NOTES!!! I always put the administrator username and password in the VM notes section. Even though we maintain an internal assets list of machines and information, it is a huge time saver to have it where you need it. In addition logins on our development and demo boxes rarely change so maintaining it in two places is not a big deal. I also elected to use a static IP address on this VM, something I normally do not do. Usually the loopback connector gets installed and VM uses DHCP, however I elected to use a static IP and also threw that in the notes.
• In the VM, I assigned the static IP and set the administrator password to never expires.
• The new volume was created on the drive added in step 5 above
• The installers for the Oracle stack and Agile PLM were copied over
• A SNAPSHOT was taken -- if you're using VMware, use VMware (in otherwords, take advantage of its features)

Here is Part 2: Provisioning and Preparing the VM, enjoy! (Opens a new window)