It would appear that since upgrading to VC 2.5 the Customization Specifications are not applying when deploying VM's.
I have tried deploying different VM's but all have the same problem. They deploy ok but when I turn them on it never automates the process. I am prompted with the Windows Welcome screen and I have to go through each step and enter in the required information (these machines are syspreped BEFORE creating templates of them).
Not sure where to start looking.
Incidently, what vNIC driver are you using in the VM?
I was playing around with a WS2K3 std R2 template by installing the enhanced VMXNET, which broke deploying new VMs from Template - the Minisetup wizard wouldn't run, after the clone had completed. All that happened was the VM would get created in vCenter with the label I supplied, however the VM ended up just being a clone of the template (i.e. the SID and computername etc were the same as the template).
After changing the template's guest OS back to WS2K3 std and the vNIC back to flexible, the minisetup wizard started running when deploying new VMs from it, and all the guest customisation ran.
The alternative is to copy SYSPREP into the Guest OS, and run it from there, by making clones of your 'template' VM
Well we this morning we got our customization scripts working again. We did 2 things. Firstly, I upgraded our virtual centre server to VC 2.5 update 4. The scripts still didn't work after this upgrade so that wasn't the source of the problem. After a bit more research & finding an article with some who has exactly the same error in the customization log files as we do found that with Symantec end point protection installed prior to deploying a template the scripts failed. He removed SEP & they started working again. We use Trend officescan so I removed it & shutdown the VM, converted it to a template & created a new customization script and then deployed a new VM & guess what, THEY WORK !!!!!!!
So the key to my problem was out A/V software getting in the way of the script trying to run the sysprep process.
Hope this may help someone else.....
Koopie
Thanks Koopie!
Can confirm that having SEP11 installed kills the customiation scripts.
Now is that a VM or a Symantec Bug?
Andy
We are running into similar problems using the Customization Specifications in conjunction with SRM.
Did you remove SEP from your vCenter server or from the VM that you were trying to apply the customization specification to?
Matthew Evans
Kraft & Kennedy, Inc.
360 Lexington Ave.
New York, NY 10017
Direct: 212.692.5608
email: evans@kraftkennedy.com
SEP was uninstalled from the template. The VC is fine with SEP installed
Andy
I answered myself. Problem was I have pre-syspreped the images before a template was created. Now when creating a template I just power it off and don't sysprep it beforehand.