• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Adding VM from template to Windows Domain

A

AMD_Gamer

Fully [H]
Joined
Jan 20, 2002
Messages
18,287
When you create a template of a Windows VM how do you handle it connecting to the domain? I just made a new VM from a Windows 7 template I cloned but when it started it up I could not login because the computer did not have a domain certificate (i forget the exact wording, maybe security association).

Should I just make a template from when it is in the workgroup and have the admin add it to the domain?
 
Use a customization spec when you deploy from template. And buy a book. ;)

EDIT: And don't clone. Use "Deploy from template..."
 
Template VMs should be in a workgroup.

You take a domain computer, clone it, and when you start that computer AD sees 2 computers with the same SID. Duplicate SIDs are a no-no.

You could use WDS to deploy new OSes too.
 
You want to deploy from a template and use customization. To do this sysprep is needed on your vCenter Server. Read this document.
 
NetJunkie said:
You don't need sysprep for Windows 7 and Server 2K8.
Click to expand...

don't you still need sysprep if you want to enter the key, create new default profile, change admin password, etc?

since I don't have direct access to our vCenter server, I just have my customized xml as part of the template, and created a bat file on the desktop. The bat file just runs sysprep then deletes the bat file.
Then I add to the domain, after sysprep runs.
 
vCenter doesn't require sysprep for anything it does via a customization spec on Win7 and 2K8.
 
Duplicate local machine SIDs aren't nearly as big of a deal as they are made out to be, and joining them to the domain actually isn't a problem. The local machine SID != the domain SID. Google it and read about this larger than life myth.

Doing a customization is necessary really to change the hostname, licensing (if necessary), and such... its just faster I think to do it that way. Having your template joined to the domain obviously is a problem, because then after deployment the host names are the same, the active directory SIDs are actually the same, etc. Obviously it needs to be in a work group. Assuming it is in a work group, you could clone and just change the hostname and network related info and it would be fine from then on for almost all situations. There are cases where having a duplicate local machine SIDs are a problem, but as far as joining machines to the domain and that's it.. not so much. All that said... changing the local SID is a best practice, and why not... its easy to do at template deployment time.
 
Thanks for the info everyone. I will just keep the templates in the default workgroup and add to domain after deployment. When I have time I need to learn all that sysprep stuff.

I also learned the difference between clone and convert today. Good thing I did not test those out on a production VM lol.

I learned some good stuff today.:D

The reason I am doing this is to setup a bunch of Windows 7 test machines to test out group policy stuff my boss is going to have me doing for the clients in the offfice.
 
NetJunkie said:
You don't need sysprep for Windows 7 and Server 2K8.
Click to expand...

I did not know that. I have only deployed a couple of 2008 servers from templates. Most of our servers are 2003. Learn something new every day.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top