Prepare the Physical Computers in VMM

Updated: May 13, 2016

Applies To: System Center 2012 SP1 - Virtual Machine Manager, System Center 2012 R2 Virtual Machine Manager, System Center 2012 - Virtual Machine Manager

You can use Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) to provision bare-metal computers as either Hyper-V hosts or as a Scale-Out File Server cluster. Before you can begin the provisioning process through VMM, you must prepare the physical computers for discovery.

To support the Hyper-V role, the computers must use x64-based processors and have the appropriate basic input/output system (BIOS) settings enabled. For more information, see Hyper-V Installation Prerequisites.

On each computer, set the BIOS boot order to boot from a Pre-Boot Execution Environment (PXE)-enabled network adapter as the first device.

To discover the physical computers through out-of-band management, the following conditions must be true:

• The baseboard management controllers (BMCs) must be configured with logon credentials and either a static IP address or an IP address that is assigned through Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP). If you use DHCP, we recommend that you configure DHCP to assign a constant IP address to each BMC, for example by using DHCP reservations.

• The VMM management server must be able to access the network segment on which the BMCs are configured.

If your environment has multiple Domain Name System (DNS) servers, where DNS replication may take some time, we strongly recommend that you create DNS entries for the computer names that will be assigned to the physical computers, and allow time for DNS replication to occur. Otherwise, host deployment may fail.

Adding Physical Computers as Hyper-V Hosts or as Scale-Out File Servers in VMM Overview