Creation of a Windows 2008 R2 template

[gheywood]

Hello,

I am working on a Windows 2008 R2 template, and am basically doing the following:

1) Create the VM with a custom configuration using a Ver7 VM, 1 CPU, and 4GB RAM.

2) Disable logging at the VM level on the VM.

3) Boot into the BIOS and disable the serial ports, parallel and the floppy drive.

4) Remove the floppy drive.

5) Once the OS installed, install VMtools.

6) Modify the network configuration for the adapter to disable QOS packet scheduler, the link-layer topologies, and IPv6.

7) Disable automatic updates.

8) Disable IE ESC.

9) Turn off Windows Firewall.

10) Enable Remote desktop.

11) Change performance options to “Adjust for best performance”.

12) Disable the hibernation file.

13) Change power options to configure for “best performance”.

14) Install and configure SNMP.

15) Defrag the drive.

16) Run sysprep to copy the profile over the default admin profile (with the generalize option selected).

The problem is, after running sysprep within the VM, the rebooting, the VM comes back up with "LAN Connection 2" rather than "LAN connection." Because of that, all the config of the network adapter (disabling the QoS packet scheduler, disabling IPv6 etc) are ignored. A lot of the settings made to the profile are ignored too.

Is there anything wrong with my unattend.xml?

Is there anything else I should be doing, but am not?

[VMmatty]

I never run Sysprep inside a guest before sealing it up and making it a template. I always use Customization Specifications in vCenter to run Sysprep. That way you can easily open up the template and patch it, make changes, etc, without having to run through Sysprep again. You should be able to configure all of those settings in the Customization Specification.

I haven't seen the issue where the NIC changes to Adapter 2 using this method. Maybe give that a go assuming you have vCenter?

[beckhamk]

Did you ever figure out why R2 after the vmware (sysprep/customization) the nic names keep changing?

Our template had: Local Area Connection & Local Area Connection 2

then after deploying the template to a vm they become: Local Area Connection 3 & Local Area Connection 4, the bigger issue is that

R2 seems to like to flip flop between what actually is nic1 and nic2 for some reason.

[Cyberfed27]

Wish I had answer, I too have noticed in R2 that the network connection name changes constantly from #1 #2 etc..

[simongeary]

There is a kb artcile about this.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=102007...

[meistermn]

The problem seem to be with “sysprep /generalize" option.

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/quebecservicingdeployment/thread/875dde2d-a0f0-412b-a1...

Another thought -Running “sysprep /generalize” removes out-of-box device drivers from the image and therefore the network adapter driver will be installed as a new instance.

If the hardware configuration on the reference computer is identical to the destination computers you can prevent this by setting the value of PersistAllDeviceInstalls for the PnpSysprep component to true. Please see the PersistAllDeviceInstalls documentation at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff716298(WS.10).aspx for details.

[cwood]

I am on vacation from Aug 15th through 20th. I will have limited access to email but will reply on my return. For urgent matters please contact:

Stacey Badwa

sbadwa@cirba.com

905.695.7501