VCD Catalog offerings for Customers

[appica_ian]

Good Morning,

We have just deployed a VCD environment and are trying to make some decisions around the templates to offer for customers.

Question 1:  Keeping updated templates can become a time consuming task.  What is everone offering in their catalogs?  Just a few 2008 and Linux templates and just providing media files for the rest of OS's?

Question 2:  With the 2008 R2 templates, how is everyone handling the activation piece?  I need to offer activated templates that won't require us to give out our product key.

Thanks in advance,

Ian

[bobdhenderson]

Ian

We're at a similar point on Q2 at the moment so bumping your thread as another party interested in what others are doing.

I've got a development rig where the activation of my Technet licensing is handled using a VAMT server for the virtualised domain infrastructure and then transferring the CIL file back and forth over  an airgap.  Fine for a small environment but obviously not going to be practical in the full environment.

My suspicion is I'll be investigating Orchestrator in more detail - have you seen http://communities.vmware.com/thread/401186 ?

Bob

[brsockel]

For Q2 have tried scripting your activations?  We are in the process of cutting over to VCD 5.1 so i have not tried it has of yet, but this is how we activate them in our Lab Manager environment.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff793433.aspx

Sample Script

@echo off
if "%1%" == "precustomization" (
echo Do precustomization tasks
) else if "%1%" == "postcustomization" (
echo Activating Windows 2008
Echo Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 >C:\windows\system32\activate.reg
Echo [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce] >>C:\windows\system32\activate.reg
Echo "Activation"="c:\\windows\\system32\\activate.cmd">>C:\windows\system32\activate.reg

Regedit -is c:\windows\system32\activate.reg

@echo off > C:\windows\system32\activate.cmd
Echo slmgr.vbs -ipk <Insert Product Key>  >>C:\windows\system32\activate.cmd
echo slmgr.vbs -ato >>C:\windows\system32\activate.cmd
echo del c:\windows\system32\activate.reg -s >>C:\windows\system32\activate.cmd
echo del c:\windows\system32\activate.cmd -s >>C:\windows\system32\activate.cmd

) else (
echo Unknown command line
)