Composed VMs NIC Disconnected

[jmarti05]

I've got an image I am trying to make linked-clones from, but when the clones come up I get the following error while provisioning.

No network communication between the View Agent and Connection Server. Please verify that the virtual desktop can ping the Connection Server via the FQDN.

The systems are not getting an IP address from DHCP because the network cards are not in a connected state.

I've verified the NICs are connected in the "parent" VM image and snapshot.

I've uninstalled / reinstalled the tools / agent (with reboots in between) several times.

I've switched the NIC type from flexible to VMXNET 3.

Any ideas on what might be causing this? This same image was used to make a "1.0" release and that composes without issue. We ran a few application changes, and this "2.0" will not compose because of this issue.

-Jonathan

[vcpguy]

I saw this some time back and this was related to insufficient ports in the Virtual Switch. Could you please check number of ports for VM port group?

[jmarti05]

Unfortunately, it's not a port issue. It appears to be related to the vCenter Customization  / sysprep settings. By switching from sysprep to quickprep I was able to build the VMs without issue. I am troubleshooting further with techsupport.

[rthoffmann]

What OS are you running?  We have just recently seen this exact behavior in a group of XP VM's that uses RDP to connect.  We had patched the template and any new full VM's built off of it have disconnected NIC's as well. 

[jmarti05]

We're running Windows XP SP3 with PCoIP. It seems our situations are similar. We had a working Windows XP image that deployed without issue. We used that image to create a new master (with application updates), and that master has the issue. I worked with tech support yesterday, and I was able to get the image to compose with quickprep. I'm waiting on the tech to call back to discuss troubleshooting sysprep.

[jmarti05]

After troubleshooting this for a few days we found that post-sysprep, Windows was trying to run a system restore. We found errors in the system log indicating that a system restore had failed. Generally speaking, it's best practice to  disable system restore entirely and doing that fixed this issue. Unfortunately, I didn't build this image. I guess that's the last time I let the desktop guys build VDI images.

[mittim12]

Good find and thanks for sharing the resolution with the forum.