I have had nothing but issues with custom specs in v5.1
We have been on 5.1 U2 for quite a while and I have had tons of issues with custom specs:
- custom specs keeps re-running (resolved in patch 5) - VMware KB: Guest customization runs repeatedly on virtual machines deployed to ESXi 5.1 host build 1743533
- deploy from template causes NIC to lose connection (despite being checked to connect at power on) - VMware KB: A template to virtual machine conversion causes virtual machine to lose network connectivity when using v…
- Custom specs won't even run on 2012 R2
We upgraded one of our clusters to 5.1 U3 and I did some test deployments. The custom specs re-run issues seems to be resolved as it should be by this version. I however, still cannot get my 2012 R2 template to run custom specs completely. Once in a blue moon it will run (and complete) custom specs and everything works fine.
Here is what I am consistently experiencing with ONLY my 2012 R2 template:
- deploy from template w/custom specs
- machine deploys and comes up to a login and appears to have never ran custom specs (asking to set admin password)
- upon further inspection, in vcenter under events I see: "started customization of VM.... blah blah blah"
- I reset VM hoping to invoke the custom specs again.
- upon reboot there is a brief moment (1-2 seconds) where the screen turns black and states: "vmware image customization is in progress" - it then IMMEDIATELY goes to a windows login screen.
- looking at the log file (C:\windows\temp\vmware-imc\guestcust.log) I don't see anything that sticks out.
- I compared this log file with a server that successfully ran custom specs and they are very similar until the one just stops. No errors or warnings or any indication why it never picks back up.