I keep finding things out about VI3 that I hadn’t read anywhere else. First it was the IDE drive support ‘issue.’ But now, it’s about making templates. I was under the impression that creating a template in VI3 involved: Installing Windows, updating Windows, performing any tweaks, creating a sysprep.inf, running Sysprep with reseal, shutting down VM, and then creating a template by cloning the VM.
Today I stumbled upon a sort-of hidden feature of VI3 called Customization Specifications. As far as I can tell, it allows you to set system settings on the VM as you deploy it from a template. To be more precise, when deploying a Windows VM you can specify the computer name, domain info, and TCP/IP settings (static IPs) for the VM during the process of creating a VM from one of your templates. Much better than having to set those things manually!
I found a document called VirtualCenter 2: Templates Usage and Best Practices on VMware’s website. It has a small section on Customization Specifications but doesn’t go into much detail. I can’t tell if I still need to Sysprep the VM, then this will go in and edit my sysprep.inf or if I just need to stop after updating/tweaking and this will do all the sysprep work for me. That seems to be an important piece of information!
There’s a little more info in the VI3 Basic System Administration PDF. Especially Appendix B, Installing the Microsoft Sysprep Tools.
For such an awesome feature, why do they try to hide it so well?
I was actually looking for the documentation on installing Sysprep on the VI box and came across your site. Hope you’ve figured out the joys of templates. I always reccomend bringing in a consultant to assist with a new VMware implementation. While the set-up and install is relatively straightforward, there is just so much to it. And you are right, there are some very basic items that aren’t as clearly documented as they should be.
[...] Today I deployed my first virtual machine with a customization specification. I talked a little bit about them in a previous article. [...]