Customisation file / Sysprep issues

[entsol]

Iam hoping someone can help here.

We are new to VMware and are currently deploying Windows 2003 server via templates. VC version 2.5.

We dont appear to be able to get a customised Sysprep to get the machines to join the domain. We believe the reason for this is we dont have DCHP assigned in our data centres. So we have to assign a static IP address to each machine we build. As we dont currently use Sysprep this has been a challenge in itself. We are relying on the VMware customisation file to create the sysprep as this appears to be only way we can get the domain join to partially work. I say "partially work" because we cannot get the autologon to work so the machine will not join the domain.

In a W3K build process we re-name the admin ID to something else. Hence we believe VMware customisation is trying to use the adminitrator ID and password and cannot due to it being renamed. But we cannot seem to find where the sysprep file that is being generated by VMware customisation. If we could find this we may be able to edit it.

Hope Iam making sense ?

[happyhammer]

are u assigning the IP address as part of the customisation wizard? if so sysprep will revert this back to DHCP, is the new VM holding its static IP address ?

[entsol]

HappyHammer...... We are prompting the user for the IP address as part of the customisation. If we manually log the machine on it will start the sysprep process with the correct IP address and the domain adding works. But this only works if we use the VMware customisation file and not a manual sysprep or Windows sysprep'd as part of the template. I believe the sysprep for VMware customisation are held in the VC database. If that is the case we need to edit those files somehow.

Thanks