Best practice on Windows deployment

[abergman89]

Hi,

I've been trying to find out whats best practice for windows deployment on vCloud Director.

I want a template image to be deployed with "SkipRearm" and eventually to add some server roles/features as IIS. I was thinking about using Deployment toolkit, but as i understand that requires PXE boot, but i just want to do some customization at first boot of the image.

Anyone have any good suggestions on how to accomplish that?

[Linjo]

Most people use sysprep to do this.

// Linjo

[abergman89]

Do you know if there is any good examples? Just using sysprep from the UI is resetting the activation. I assume a customization script should be used?

17 mar 2013 kl. 13:27 skrev Joel Lindberg <communities-emailer@vmware.com<mailto:communities-emailer@vmware.com>>:

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Best practice on Windows deployment

reply from Joel Lindberg<http://communities.vmware.com/people/Linjo> in VMware vCloud Director - View the full discussion<http://communities.vmware.com/message/2212134#2212134

[aneverov]

Hi,

Guest customization tries to determine and re-use product key for some OS/key types (mostly pre-Vista). In that case, sysprep's "generalization/specialization" shouldn't be an issue, except that it's allowed up to 3 times. If you want to lift that limitation, you would have to use different keys (either yourself in pre-customization script or patch sysprep.inf/.xml which guest customization relies on).

Otherwise, the best practice would be to rely on KMS (which always sets re-arm count to 1 and is available from Vista and above) in pre-customization script. In 5.1.1 we changed customization to apply networking settings before pre-customization script is run to enable this scenario.

You could also use "no SID" customization, but as far as I can tell that would be against Microsoft policy which requires using sysprep's "generalization/specialization".

/Andrii