windows 2012 R2 and vCloud

[Mattvo]

Is there a version of vCloud Director 5.1 that supports the installation of Windows 2012 R2?

Thanks

Matt

[IamTHEvilONE]

If you intend to install the vCloud Director application on Windows 2012 (anything) that's not possible.  vCD as an application installs on RHEL and CentOS (as of 5.5).

If you want a version of vCloud Director which can customize Windows 2012, this Guest OS is supported as of vCloud 5.1.

[Mattvo]

Right I know Windows 2012 is supported as a guest OS (sorry I shoudl have been more specific) but is Windows 2012 R2 supported?  I know it's supported as a guest OS on ESXi 5.1 U1, but what build of vCD is it supported on...if any.

Matt

[aneverov · Accepted solution]

Hi Matt,

Based on the history of the changes, I can tell that Windows 2012 R2 should work just fine even on 5.1.0 GA. Of course, it's best to use the latest available 5.1.x version.

Note that there is no separate guest OS ID for it, so the VM should be set as Windows 2012.

Best Regards,

Andrii

[Mattvo]

Excellent, thank you for your help.

Matt

[aneverov]

Just to mention it, there was some issue reported with Windows 8.0/2012. The symptom was that customization would get stuck when applied to a just cloned VM which not powered on before customization. I personally have never seen it repro with many templates we've tried. Anyway, the fix was backported and will be available in 5.1.3 (and 5.5.0 GA as well).

/Andrii

[MKguy]

Just to mention it, there was some issue reported with Windows 8.0/2012. The symptom was that customization would get stuck when applied to a just cloned VM which not powered on before customization.

I've seen it all the time in multiple environments, you had to trigger the scheduled task created to run the customization either manually or through a reboot after template deployment and initial power-on. Anyways, this issue was fixed in vCenter 5.1 U1 already: VMware KB: Guest OS customization of Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 may not complete

On the topic of vCD support: I don't think vCD has to "support" Guest OSes directly and I know of no such matrix/compatibility list. If the ESXi hosts and vCenter, which are directly interacting with the guest OS, support it, then vCD is covered as it merely hooks into vCenter APIs.

[aneverov]

Yes, that sounds like the same issue. I didn't know there is a KB on it. So, that's the fix I was talking about which got integrated into vCD 5.5 and should be in 5.1.3 as well.

Regarding the OS support, it's true that support for "running" those comes from ESXi. With that said, in 5.1.x and before vCD didn't make use of the vCenter API related to the OS support and instead relied on some internal metadata. That has been fixed in 5.5.

The support for "customizing" OSes is a different thing. It's not an ESXi feature. Historically, there have been two completely separate codebases. The one from vCenter and the other one from vCD (which came from the LabManager times). It's only in vCD 5.5 I did the switch to the vCenter codebase. However, vCD still does not call the vCenter API for customization, because the two workflows are sufficiently different.

/Andrii