I understand the overall general purpose of what sysprep is. But I’m not sure if it created a file or something I can use as the golden image to deploy onto my other systems. I was hoping it was gonna create an iso or wim file that I could throw onto a USB thumb drive and use that to install Windows on my other machines.
I missed a class somewhere. Funny I don’t remember skipping any of those classes. 😔
vhd to iso converter. Never used them, but I heard that’s one way to get a VM to ISO installer.
What typically happens here is you sysprep the machine and then you would convert it to an image. In enterprise, we’d create this “golden image” and then whenever we pass automation to create a VM we specify the use of that image. Once the image is in the right state, you should be able to select that image and then say “new VM from Image” or something similar to that. I’m speaking in generic terms, but Hyper-V can do this.
Capture image using DISM is basically how you do this when you need to do this for hardware via USB.
I understand the overall general purpose of what sysprep is.
It seems you do not understand what sysprep does at all. Without SCVMM (iirc) you cannot create templates in Hyper-V. If you can you just sysprep the VM, shut it down, convert it to a template and you can re-deply it as many times as you want.
One way could be to use imaging tools such as Acronis.
Make a bootable .iso and and extra .vhd for a second HDD
Boot into the .iso and make your image on the second drive.
Then disconnect the .iso and boot your VM normally.
Then once VM has booted, set up SMB share for the second HDD, then use that to copy the image from the VM second HDD to the actual VM host.
Then make a bootable Acronis .iso, copy the image from hyper v host to the bootable Acronis USB, and you will have achieved you goal.
But need an acronis license, or some equivalent and similar software.