Customization specs magically stop working

[Strago]

Issue:

My newly deployed win2008R2 VM's will not receive ANY settings.  It will flash the "applying vmware settings" (not sure of exact wording) DOS message for a few seconds, but then will go to the "Set up Windows" sysprep wizard prompt.

Criteria:

3 months ago I had upgraded vCenter 4.1 to 5.1.  Templates that I have left untouched still get settings applied fine.  If I power on a template and do nothing other than apply sysprep + generalize + OOBE, it will cause this issue.

I have never had a problem modifying my templates prior to my VC upgrade.

I have also upgraded most esxi hosts to 5.1, but I don't think this is related, because this still occurs on 4.1 with old vmtools and virtual hardware.

Thanks,

Jaime

[vmroyale]

Note: Discussion successfully moved from VMware ESXi 5 to VMware vCenter™ Server

[mwpreston]

Any chance you might have upgraded to IE 10 inside your templates?

This happened to me, I blogged about it here...

http://blog.mwpreston.net/2013/03/28/why-arent-my-vms-sysprepping-have-you-recently-installed-i-e-10...

Basically just a reg hack to get things all syspreppy again

[Strago]

Thanks!   This one for me was.. user error    For some reason I had it in my head that a sysprep /generalize /oobe was required after *any* time the template was powered on for maintenance.  This caused vcenter to not be able to apply its stuff.