Comments on: Deploying a Virtual Machine from a Template with Virtual Center 2.5

By: vishnu

vishnu — Mon, 09 May 2011 05:49:17 +0000

Hi,

How can we deploy multiple VM’s using TEMPLATE………………

By: vinf.net

vinf.net — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 21:50:35 +0000

What os? Maybe check vmtools is current

By: Soham

Soham — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 12:21:00 +0000

Hi
The article is crystal clear, but I am having big problems with this task.
Till ‘OS Starting VM tools installing’ everything is perfect, and then the Os goes into a reboot loop from which it never recovers.
Please help ?

By: Location of Sysprep Files When you Install vCenter on a Windows 2008 Server « Virtualization, Windows, Infrastructure and all that “stuff” in-between

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 08:01:18 +0000

[...] You can then extract the deploy.cab file to the appropriate folder and use the customization specification functionality (like this ESX 3.5 example) [...]

By: vinf

vinf — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 19:48:21 +0000

There are loads of script type options – it’s not really my area of expertise but I’m sure Mr Renouf will have something on his site – http://www.virtu-al.net/

By: Mike Maliska

Mike Maliska — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 18:46:16 +0000

Thanks for the article has been a big help. I do however need to take this a step further. I have mastered the steps in the article and I have deployed and redeployed over 500 machines now. What I am looking for is a way to automate this process. Let’s say I make a new template and I want all the machine that were made with the old template to redeploy. I have to spend a lot of time doing this. Basically I am looking for a command line or API way of doing these steps.

Thanks for your help.

Mike

By: How to Deploy a Windows 2008 Server From a Template with vSphere « Virtualization, Windows, Infrastructure and all that “stuff” in-between

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 23:09:55 +0000

[...] With ESX 3.5 and Virtual Centre 2.5 you needed to copy a bunch of sysprep files to use the excellent template deployment functionality (step by step account here) [...]

By: Simon Alexander

Simon Alexander — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 06:21:50 +0000

This is a great step-by-step article. I wonder if you’ve ever come across the issue I am having. I had the sysprep customisations working beautifully in VC2.0, but since upgrading to VC2.5, when deploying from a template I can run through the customisation wizard, and I see from the logs that the sysprep files are prepared and copied to the VM, but when the VM powers up it does not go through the sysprep/minisetup wizard. It comes up as a direct clone of the template. The sysprep files are sitting in C:\sysprep, and I’ve left it running for 10 minutes and nothing happens. I then have to manually run newsid. All the posts I’ve found talk about getting the wizard to run, but that works for me. It’s just this last step that’s frustrating me!!!

By: Greg McLean

Greg McLean — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 02:43:13 +0000

Wow! I really like your article. Screenshots are great, don’t you agree? We don’t use the sysprep, but maybe we should. I cannot make modifications during the deploying of the template to a VM. The customization buttons are greyed out! When I complete the deployment, I cannot change the name of the server!!! It states that the “account already exists”! This ia a real pain! I can rename it to any other name besides the one I named it during the deployment, where I’m asked to name the VM (not the server, but the VM). Any ideas??? Regards, Greg McLean Systems Analyst, County of Santa Cruz, CA. 831-454-2081.

By: vinf

vinf — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:03:35 +0000

I followed the steps in the sysprep section of this doc
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vc_2_templates_usage_best_practices_wp.pdf

make sure you download the correct version of sysprep for your OS. I just extracted it from the Win2003SP2 CD and extracted the files to the appropriate location.

there are sub-folders for each OS 1.1,2k,svr2003, svr2003-64,xp,xp-64.

for reference I expanded the files from the deploy.cab file into the svr2003 folder.

VC must know what OS you have based on your choices when creating the master VM config and looks in the appropriate path.