Hi there,
We're running View 5.2 in a Proof of Concept (PoC) environment and are just starting to look at creating Full Clones.
We have created multiple linked clone pools, both with and without guest customisations, with no issues (I believe this uses quickprep).
We have created a couple of customisation scripts in vSphere, one for Windows XP and one for Windows 7, but both Full Clone pools are failing to proivision correctly (which I believe uses Sysprep). I have put the required Sysprep files onto the vCenter Server so I don't believe that's the issue (as I also think they'd be failing with an obvious error if it was down to an issue with the Sysprep files, and that wouldn't explain the Win 7 issues anyway). The issues I'm having are:
Windows 7:
From within the View console the status of the pools shows as "Customising". After a very long time I checked the provisioning VM through vSphere and it was sat at the Ctrl/Alt/Del screen which it continued to do for over 2 hours (The pool is a single Win 7 desktop froma standard Win 7 image having been optimised for a virtual environment). After another very lengthy period of time I tried logging in manually, using the password I had set in the customisation script, but got "incorrect username/password" errors. I tried the Administrator password set in the parent VM, blank password etc. butnone worked.
As part of the customisation I am trying to get the machine to join the machine into our PoC domain. I've specified my own PoC domain/View admin account as the account to join the machine to the domain (I've tried manually joining a machine into our PoC domain just to rule out an account issue), and tried various different settings from within the customisation script but can't get past that point. I assume that the script is failing at the domain join, but I would have thought that would result in a timeout error, as per my XP pool below, but I left it for several hours (over 3) and there was no change.
Windows XP:
The XP machine is similar, with the View console showing the status as customising, but but it's sat on the XP desktop screen rather than the Ctrl/Alt/Del screen. Customisation files are exactly the same from a configuration point of view.
One difference was that if I left the XP pool to provision (and this is a single View Desktop of a basic XP image) for well over an hour(!) it would change to 'error' stating that the customisation script had timed out.
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I've checked the View Composer logs and from what i can tell, View composer is showing that the process has completed successfully. I'm putting this down to the fact that the Clone is being completed successfully and it's the customisation that's failing.
I've checked the log files on the XP View Desktop and there's nothing obvious that I can see (I've done the usual checks for Fail, Warning etc, and manually read through the log file line by line), and can't find anything but then I'm finding very little on VMware Forums/Communities/Google regarding issues with Full Clone Customisations, and I'm as pretty much a novice; unless it stated "FAILURE OVER HERE DUE TO X, Y, OR Z" I'm probably going to miss it...and no log file makes it that easy for you!
I'm more than happy to upload any files that people might require, but I didn't want to attach anything that was of no use, so if there's something that you need to see then let me know and I'll upload it.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. All the other issues I've come across (and there's been a few) I've managed to work our from admin guides and the forums, but I'm drawing a blank on Full Clone customisation errors!
Thanks very much in advance.