Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between

If you have a lot of customization specifications setup in your vCenter server you are likely to want to copy these to your vSphere/vCenter 4 lab or production system when it’s released, otherwise it’s a bit tedious typing it all in again 🙂

The following steps show how to export and then import your guest customization specifications into vCenter 4 you have to do them one by one as there is no multi-select available.

First, export the settings from the vCenter 2.5 server using the VI client connected to the vCenter 2.5 server (not the ESX host)

Then save each one out as an .XML file

Then connect your VI client to your vCenter 4 server (not the vSphere host itself) and go to the home view and click on the Customization Specifications Manager icon

Then click import and choose the .XML file you exported previously

Click OK and it will import the template

if you have encrypted passwords stored in your customization template then you will be prompted to re-enter them (unless you used a real certificate or PKI across both hosts)

It will then run you through the guest customization wizard to re-enter the password, but don’t worry all the other settings are retained you only need to re-type the password.

Once you’ve been through this process the customization specification is now available for use when you deploy from a template within vCenter 4.

Other than that the overall template process is similar to the VI3 process that I wrote about a while ago here