I'm observing a strange behavior when deploying a virtual machine from a Windows 8 template.
The environment has vCenter Server 5.0.0,623373, managing a couple of ESXi 5.0.0, 623860 hosts (vSphere 5.0 Update 1).
When deploying a VM from the template (using a guest customization), sometimes the new VM does not automatically start the customization process. This happens about 30% of the time. If I manually reboot the cloned VM, then the customization would start and the new VM gets customized according to the guest customization specification. The same template is used to repeat this several times, and sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn't. It doesn't matter which ESXi host the VM is running on either. I think for the VMs that worked, the sysprep process reboots the VM automatically after the new VM is powered on. So for the ones that did not work, it appears that sysprep isn't restarting the VM for some reason.
Has anyone observed this? I have two environments with same version/build of vCenter Server and ESXi hosts, and have observed this issue in both environments. Is this supported in vCenter Server 5.0 Update 1?
