vSphere 5.5 VM Templates

#Chri5# · 8 Aug 2014 at 10:03

I'm building a Windows Server 2012 R2 I want to make into a template. Thus I'm tweaking all the bits like pining things to the taskbar, adding in tools we consider essential.

Although based on Server 2008, this blog post runs SysPrep inside the VM before converting it to a template with vSphere (which also runs SysPrep AIUI) to copy the profile settings to the default user. Is that still needed on 2012?

I've created a Customization Spec in the "fat" vSphere Client for Time Zone settings, new SID etc

#Chri5# · 8 Aug 2014 at 16:30

Will this keep the profile personalisation? So things I've pinned to the taskbar, desktop icons etc?

#Chri5# · 13 Aug 2014 at 10:53

Cheers folks.

Found this little util which copies your current profile to the default profile. Saves having to re-pin everything to the taskbar (etc)

#Chri5# · 15 Aug 2014 at 21:55

Does the CopyProfile unattend.xml work as a custom file with the vSphere Customization Manager? The blog post I linked to in my original post was running SysPrep inside the VM, which the guys above said don't do...

#Chri5# · 19 Aug 2014 at 15:03

On a fresh VM, I've gone through doing an in VM SysPrep for the OOBE. I put Registered User/Owner, CopyProfile (true) and SkipRearm (1) into the XML (via WSIM) and ran:

Code:

C:\windows\system32\sysprep\sysprep.exe  /generalize /unattend:unattend.xml

Once that had rebooted, I converted my VM into a template in vSphere, then deployed as new VM.

My desktop shortcuts and other profile changes have been kept but things pinned to the Taskbar haven't. It turns out they aren't part of the user profile (I wonder why?) - see here:

When running sysprep in Windows 7 with the unattend.xml file, you will probably notice that the taskbar icons are something that don’t copy over. Well that is because the icons are not part of the users profile. So the copyprofile=true command does work for almost everything, but it doesn’t copy over your taskbar icons. So here is a script that will do it for you.

Time to knock up a bit of PowerShell to do the pinning.