Automatic guest customization is not supported on this Guest OS type

[vmsysadmin20111]

Cloud Director 10.1

No matter which guest OS is set (tried Windows 10, 2016, 2012, Ubuntu, etc), when enabling guest customization, the following message is displayed:

"Automatic guest customization is not supported on this Guest OS type. The settings on this page will be passed to the Guest OS. You can use custom scripts to configure the Guest OS. Refer to documentation for details."

What's the purpose of this message? Are there any Guest OS types where automatic customization is supported? What is "Automatic guest customization"? There is no documentation available as far as I can see that would explain this.

Further, the documentation that can be found (Understanding Guest Customization​), states that "When you add virtual machines from the catalog to a new vApp, the virtual machines are enabled for guest customization by default." That's not true. I've created a new vApp, added a Windows 10 VM from catalog to the new vApp, and customization on this VM shows as disabled.

Finally, is it even possible to enable customization on the vApp template in the catalog? I have imported a few VMs from vCenter and on all of them the "Edit" button is grayed out in "Guest OS Customization" menu.

Any insight would be very much appreciated.

[mpsc_sela · Accepted solution]

Thanks for bringing this issue to our attention. The banner is not supposed to be for all OSes but only for those OSes where auto personalization is false. We do have a list of OSes where auto personalization value is true.

Looking more, we really don't use this auto personalization setting to enable guest customization automatically. We will investigate more if this has any significance in the OS itself. For now I have raised an internal bug to not show this banner when OS supports auto personalization.

About your other questions: Yes, vapp templates are immutable and you cannot enable/disable guest customization on them. Generally when we capture a template we have two options: Identical copy, and  'Customize on Instantiate' The first option does not do customization, but if template was captured with second option, we do customization on instantiation from the template.

[vmsysadmin20111]

Thank you for the reply, I appreciate it. I was not able to find a list of Guest OSes that support customization in VCD, I'm assuming it's the same list as for vCenter: https://partnerweb.vmware.com/programs/guestOS/guest-os-customization-matrix.pdf​.

Other than that, the customization works well, even with unsupported Guest OSes such as Debian 10 after a few tweaks - debian 9 (stretch) customizing NIC uses wrong interface name · Issue #130 · vmware/open-vm-tools · G...