Auto guest customization

[tman24]

To cut a long story short, when creating Windows 7 templates, is there any way of permanently assigning a guest customization policy to a template? If I manually step through deploying a VM from a template, I can assign a guest customization, but it *has* to be done manually. I want to be able to deploy a VM from a template and have it always use a guest customization automatically. This is on vCenter/ESXi 6.0. Don't mind if it's via the vi or web clients. I can set the virtual hardware level to whatever's required.

[rcporto · Accepted solution]

You can just build a answer file called unattend.xml (with all your guest customization), store this file on to c:\windows\system32\sysprep, run the sysprep using the command C:\windows\system32\sysprep\sysprep.exe /generalize /unattend:unattend.xml and shutdown the VM. Convert the VM to template and now you're ready to deploy VMs from this template that if you don't specify the guest customization on deploy from template wizard, you always will get the customization from unatted.xml file.

[tman24]

Yeah, thanks. I had already tried that, but I think there must have been something wrong with the unattend.xml file I was using. I've now had another go, and you're right, it does seem to do the trick, so this should do what I need.