Background: We use MSMQ extensively, while we understand that it's not a perfect choice and creates many problems we cannot cease it's use at the moment.
In order to use MSMQ, we figured out that we need a domain controller - however this now creates an additional problem when we try to clone Amazon EC2 instances in order to add more power to our web farm.
What we have done:
- Installed a fully working web server, with MSMQ, connected to the DC
- Created an AMI from the Machine
- Created a new instance from the AMI (we wish we could simply end here)
- The new instance being ready, we run SysPrep on it - to create a new pure machine with a new SID
- Then when the machine reboots, we start to have issues logging into either web farm server the machine created in step 2 is powered off and we only have the machine from step 1 and step 3. We eventually have to shut down one machine in order to be able to access the other.
Our goal: Be able to have (ideally) an AMI standing by that can be used to quickly spin up an EC2 instance and add it to the load balancer reducing the load on the farm. Spinning up instances could be manual or automated it doesn't really matter at this point - we just don't want to keep spinning up machines manually and then manually configuring them and then manually adding them to the load balancer.
Our question: How can we automatically spin up Windows 2012 boxes as part of our web farm, with our "web site" and MSMQ pre-installed so that when the machine comes online it is part of the load balancer and simply gets to work?
Thanks for any help
