Windows Update for numerous powered-down Virtual Machines [closed]
You might be better off with something like vCloud Director and VMWare View. This will allow you to have centralized templates for each sales item and remotely access them with View. You'll only need to keep the templates up to date and linked clones are spawned on-demand for each sales demo and are then discarded after. This will eliminate the need to each sales person to download a full image to their laptop. They just self-provision a demo environment prior to the meeting and connect to it with View (or Remote Desktop).
You don't say what specific technology you're using, so this is a vSphere specific recommendation, but Hyper-V has a similar solution called Lab Management in SCVMM from what I understand.
To address your concern about "free" - you're going to have a hard time doing this for free. There's a huge benefit to virtualization, but unless you want to create your own tools, you're going to have to pony up some $$.
If you're a Microsoft SA customer that's entitled to MDOP, you could loook ad MED-V, which is basically a management layer on top of Virtual PC. It's a far cry from the capabilities of vCloud Director and View, and you'll probably have to to a lot of scripting and cobbling together, but it will let you deploy and manage custom packaged VMs to individual workstations.
Something like View or other remote-access would be easier to manage (and are the reps happy with the performance of running a guest on their machine?), but if you're dead-set on distributing these, then you could do this:
- Script something to either do WOL for the target VM guests, or using vCLI to power the hardware on at the desired times/intervals
- Have the machines in the domain and thus an OU to get all their updates from WSUS every day and automatically install or .... 2.a. Script automatic updates in the target guests with third-party software (no easy hooks for AU built into Windows, IME)
- Script something to get the company files in there as well.
- Script the power off, either from within the guest to call shutdown, or via vCLI to power the hardware down gracefully.