How can I create virtual machines as part of a build process using MSBuild and MS Virtual Server and/or Hyper-V Server Virtualization?

Question

What I would like to do is create a clean virtual machine image as the output of a build of an application.

So a new virtual machine would be created (from a template is

Answer 1

Checkout Powershell Management library for Hyper-V on CodePlex. Some features:

Finding a VM
Connecting to a VM
Discovering and manipulating Machine states
Backing up, exporting and snapshotting VMs
Adding and removing VMs, configuring motherboard settings.
Manipulating Disk controllers, drives and disk images
Manipluating Network Interface Cards
Working with VHD files

Answer 2

You can actually script a fair number of tasks in MS Virtual Server:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/scripts/vs/default.mspx?mfr=true

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa368876(VS.85).aspx

Also Virtual PC guy has got a ton of stuff on his blog about scripting Virtual Server/PC and now Hyper-V here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/default.aspx

VMware has similar capabilities:

http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/scripting-API/