Strugling please help

[Arangies]

Hi there everyone, ok I have a weird problem and dont know what I am doing wrong.

I am creating vm's through VDM in a persistant pool, what's happening at the moment is that after it creates the new vm it leaves the conect at startup option unselected at the NIC.

Seeing that this is happening the vm can't run the prepared sysprep file and I have to configure each of them manually.

I have rechecked my template and that is fine, if I convert it to a vm and check the NIC settings it is set to connect at startup.

Has anyone else maybe experianced something like this??

Any help would be greatly appreciated

Thanks Jacques

[mittim12]

What happens if you deploy a machine from Virtual Center? Do you see the same thing or do the correct settings transfer to the cloned VM?

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[Arangies]

OK I just created a vm from the template through Virtual Center and that vm was created fine, straight after it was created I looked at the NIC settings and the option Connect at startup was selected

[mittim12]

Maybe this is a timing issue? I just increased my pool size in order to test this out and initially when the VM was powered on it did not have the connect to network option checked. Once it powers up it discovers new devices and then reboots. On the second power on the option to connect at power up is checked.

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[mike_laspina]

Hi,

The vmware.log should have some indication of an error.

[mpryor]

There are two common causes I've seen for this when using VI3.5. One is that the sysprep process changed under VC2.5 so that the VMtools initiate it, this means that the VM starts up with the nic disconnected, then VMtools initiate a reboot with sysprep, re-enabling the nic in the process. This can take a minute or so to happen. The second common problem is that the VM is being deployed onto a different ESX server that doesn't have a VM network with the same name as the one used by the template, if that's the case not only will the nic be disconnected, it will also not have a network selected in the VM properties dialogue box.

[Arangies]

OK I have recreated the template from scratch and now it looks like it is starting up properly running the sysprep and joining the vm's correctly to the domain.

The next problem I am experiancing now is that everytime the new vm is created from the template it restores the xp pro default proxy setting, in other words I can't ping the vm, also I see that the new bunch of vm's created just keep saying customizing in the vdm administrator window if I look in the status field. Hence if I launch my VMWare VDM Client it cant connect to thet vm because its not "ready". But if I look at the vm it is ready and waiting

What could the problem be here??

[mittim12]

In my experience this has always been caused by either the Windows firewall or some type of third party firewall blocking the agent. It could also be an agent issue but I would go with the firewall first.

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[Arangies]

I have checked all the firewall/proxy settings and everything looks good nothing out of the ordinary and they are the same as the vm's that are displaying ready.

This is what I have tried, I have 2 desktop groups, if I point the oridinal desktop group (the group I created 1st) to the template it creates the vm's 100% and also make them ready for use, if I point the tepmlate the the desktop group created second it creartes the vm's, joins them to the domain but the status never changes to ready. That is my greatest problem now, I can basically only create and use 1 desktop group and not multiple desktop groups :_|

Could this be a licensing issue? as the license we have currently isn't the full one but still the one from the supliers used for the VDI instalation procedure?? (This I only picked up yesterday after going through all the settings!!!)

[mittim12]

VDM is licensed per concurrent user so I don't think it would affect deploying VM's from a template. Have you checked both the VDM connection broker logs and the agent logs located on the machine you built?

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[mpryor]

Could you grab a support bundle from one of these VMs stuck in the 'Customizing...' state? There's a script located at C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware VDM\Agent\DCT\support.bat that will collect logs and other useful information about the environment, and will test the connection from the agent to the connection server.

[Arangies]

OK this is getting more and more confusing, the second desktop group for some reason do not install the VDM Agent.

If I use the same template on both Desktop groups the 1st group installes everything corectly and the 2nd group doesn't install the VDM Agent, any idea why that would happen?

[mpryor · Accepted solution]

No idea, I have the agent installed on the template itself rather than try to install it as part of the sysprep process. I assume that if you install the agent on these machines they start to work properly?

[Arangies]

Just installed it and after that it worked 100%, thanks you very much for the assistance.

I that when creating the vm's through the pool option it would automatically install the agent but looks like it doesnt on the 2nd desktop group for some reason, will just install it in the template as you sugested

[SanMan_Lite]

I have had a slightly different experience thus far.

I found that on the first pool I deployed I did not have the agent pre-installed on the template and all VMs deployed 100% and came up with a "Ready" status. Ever since that point I have NEVER (for 2 days now) had a VM deployed and make it past the "Customizing" phase.

I have tried numerous suggestions such as manually adding the DNS/WINS entries instead of allowing DHCP to assgn them, uninstalling the agent from the template and redeploying, and just reinstalling the agent after deployment. Oh yeah, and the template that I am using, deployed with the customization specification that I'm using work just fine when deployed directly through VC.

None of these things have helped. I feel that I have done everything short of reinstalling VDM to solve this to no avail. Anyone have any ideas?

+*UPDATE*+ I was able to get this problem resolved by simply reinstalling the VDM Agent on the provisioned Virtual Machines.

Message was edited by: SanMan_Lite