Deployment Overview

VMware offers a quick and easy way to clone Windows systems. But what alot of people fail to realize is that VMware can also manage the post customization process of cloning using Sysprep. I find that most of my clients deploy new Windows machines by cloning their gold image and then running newsid on the clone before joining it to the domain. The entire process could take anywhere from 5-20 minutes depending on how fast their hardware is, and I don't know about you, but my time could be much better spent.

We will walk through the required vCenter 2.x configurations for sysprep support and then demonstrate an example deployment. Lets get to work!

Configuring vCenter with Sysprep Support

We will begin by installing the Windows sysprep binaries into vCenter.

1. Download the sysprep binaires for the operating systems you wish to perform clones of
   • Windows Server 2000 - Q257813_W2K_SP1_X86_EN.exe
     
   • Windows Server 2003 - WindowsServer2003-KB892778-SP1-DeployTools-x86-ENU.cab
   • Windows XP - deploy.cab
   
   Note: Sysprep binaries for Server 2003 and XP are also located on your installation CD under:
   \Support\Tools\Deploy.cab
   Sysprep binaries for Server 2000 are located on your installation CD under:
   \support\deployment\deploy.cab
   
2. vCenter expects to find the sysprep binaires under:
   C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\sysprep
   
   
   
   We will need to extract the binaries into the appropriate directories for each OS on the vCenter server.
   
   

   Windows Server 2000

   Extract Q257813_W2K_SP1_X86_EN.exe to C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\sysprep\1.1

   
   

   Windows Server 2003

   Extract WindowsServer2003-KB892778-SP1-DeployTools-x86-ENU.cab to C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\sysprep\svr2003 C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\sysprep\svr2003-64

   
   

   Windows XP

   Extract deploy.cab to C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\sysprep\xp C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\sysprep\xp-64

   
   Note: The Application Data folder might be hidden.  If you can not see the folder, you will need to update your folder view options to "Show hidden files and folders"
   
   
   
   

Comments

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Anonymous |12/04/2010 10:40:54 cool stuff....thanks... Reply | Quote

Carlo  - Windows 2008 |10/11/2010 04:11:51 Ok, thanks for this post bu what about 2008? Which are the differences between sysprep behavior between windows 2003 and windows 2008? Thanks!!! Reply | Quote

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