Preparing a Provisioning Machine

Provision the AppStacks on a clean base image, that is a virtual machine, that closely resembles the target environment to which you later plan to deploy the AppStack.

For example, the provisioning virtual machine and the target should be at the same patch and service pack level. If you have included applications in the base image, they should also be present in the provisioning virtual machine.

Perform provisioning on a virtual machine that does not have any assigned AppStacks. If you have previously assigned any AppStacks to the virtual machine, or if the virtual machine has been used for provisioning before, that virtual machine should be set back to a clean snapshot before you begin provisioning a new AppStack.