Clone 2008 R2 from template problem

[chipflyer]

I have a bunch of 2008 R2 machines that I will be deploying over the next month and I am not having much luck cloning from template with this OS. I am using ESXI 3.5 u5 and have always cloned from template on 2003, Vista, and XP with no issues. I have created a 2008 R2 customization file using the Customization Specification manager and have a good base template that I want to use. Upon completion of the clone job the VM restarts and the customization wizards starts, quickly ends and leaves the machine at the "change you administrator password" dialog just like it was a fresh install. You can restart the Vm as many times as you want and the same thing happens over and over, Ground Hog day style.

Has anyone been able to clone a 2008 R2 Vm with good results? Are there other good blogs or how to's out there that might be of help? I really don't want to go through the extra work of syspreping a bunch of Vms.

thanks

Jeff

[RParker]

Sounds like the disk is in non-persistent mode, almost as if it is not saving changes.

We have not had many problems deploying Windows 2008, but I did have issues cloning them with customization. I can clone them, but they won't customize, and they would get a reboot like you describe, so I had to clone them without customize, and I feel your pain about sysprep on many VM's.

So I finally created a NEW VM, and it seems to work fine. so maybe something inside the VM is causing it. I also found that you should disable UAC prior to deploy or cloning.

But these events that you describe I have not seen.

[chipflyer]

The disk is deffinately NOT in non-persistant mode. I rebuilt the template vm and tried it again with better results, however after a succesfull clone I have found now that the machine didn't join the domain and it did not add the product key and activate windows. It did however rename it. I will do a bit more testing today and see if I can make it all work. I guess I will look more closely at the customization file.