Booting the source VM back up will cause you to configure the OS and you won’t be able to clone it again without another sysprep.
Sysprep is meant to provide you with a pre-configured windows environment that you can clone and boot whenever you want to create a new Windows VM, instead of running through the install process each time.
The importance of this article is to point out how to clone the virtual hard disks so they can be attached to a new VM. These steps eliminate common causes for the problem by verifying the sysprep files, verifying the virtual machine configuration, and verifying the the vCenter Server configuration. You should use this as a guide to create a new template rather than sysprepping one of your existing VMs. This article provides troubleshooting steps for template deployment and cloning in vCenter Server failures. It sounds like you are talking about sysprepping a VM that is already a production VM and then returning it to its original state which isn’t really recommended as the original VM won’t function the same after it boots back from sysprep. It’s not common practice to boot the source VM back up, unless it is to make a change and then sysprep/shutdown and clone again. system32/sysprepĮxecute the following to shut down your Windows Server VM and leave it powered off for cloning: Let’s say for Windows Server 2012R2 we want to make a template. You make this the same way you would make any other VM, but instead of adding a new hard disk you attach one that already exists. You will use this tool to make a copy of the virtual hard drive, and later attach that new virtual hard drive to a new virtual machine you configure to spec. This can be used through the ESXi shell or SSH to the host. The proper way to clone a VM in my opinion is to use the vmkfstool on the ESXi host itself. We would like to copy our Windows and Unix virtual machines which were created on the first VMWare machine over to the backup machine. We then built a backup server, and installed VSphere. We recently purchased a VSphere 6.7 server from an integrator to migrate our SCO Unix 5.0.7 to.
When you have a VM crafted in the way that you like, with all the software installed or just simply up-to-date with Windows Updates and of course, past the installation. Copying VSphere 6.7 virtual machines to a backup server. I’m assuming you already have basic knowledge of templating and wiping the system’s unique identifiers (sysprep for windows, etc) In a few seconds, your new VMFS datastore will be available on ESXi.Sure, there are many ways to make a copy of an OS or VM and spin it up in another instance. Select VMFS 6 as a file system and specify that you want to entire the volume of the iSCSI disk for the datastore. Open Storage -> Datastores -> New datastore.Įnter the name of your VMFS datastore and select the iSCSI LUN to create it. Then you can create a VMFS (Virtual Machine File System) datastore to store virtual machine files on the connected iSCSI LUN. Using ISCSI Offload Engine: false Create a VMFS Datastore on iSCSI LUN in VMWare ESXi You can also get the current settings of a software iSCSI HBA adapter as follows: # esxcli iscsi software set -e true Software iSCSI Enabled Make sure that the software iSCSI is enabled on your ESXi host: Then check if the iSCSI TCP Port 3260 is available on the storage using netcat (in this example, 192.168.113.60 is the IP address of the vmk1 interface): In this example, the iSCSI storage responds to ping. Using the command below, you can check the availability of your iSCSI storage (192.168.113.10) from the specified vmkernel port (vmk1):