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If it's worth that much money to you, how much of your time would you say?

The reason I ask is that Hashicorp's Packer[1] is awesome at doing things like that.

Personally, I have an automated Packer build that spins up Windows 8.1 and Windows 10, provisions it and installs all of the necessary software, and then preps it for Windows Deployment Services. I originally based the work off of packer-windows[2] but ended up re-rolling most of it again from scratch.

If you don't mind spending roughly a day or two figuring it out, then it's well worth it!

[1] https://www.packer.io/ [2] https://github.com/joefitzgerald/packer-windows



Yes, packer looks good. But it's a bit overkill for my use case and doesn't really solve the "time" issue (or does it?).

Somebody could use packer and publish the artifacts on a website, were I can download the desired image and have it running in 5 minutes. That's what I'd pay for.


Once you sink the time into setup, it really takes care of itself.

You could basically schedule/cron/whatever the job to build once a month/week/day on your machine and it will always dump the up-to-date virtual machine in the location you choose.

I should also point out that Packer is the program that they use to create Vagrant boxes.




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