VMware VirtualCenter 1.3.x Support Documentation

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Virtual Hardware Requirements for Guest Customization

Guest customization requires that the source virtual machine used to create the clone or templates has the following:

When a virtual machine is cloned or used for a template, the new virtual machine has the exact same number and type of NICs, for example, AMD VLance/PcNet versus high-performance VMware vmxnet. This cannot be changed during the deployment or guest customization process.

The default configuration for VMware Workstation and GSX Server creating a Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 virtual machine is IDE disks. If you are customizing a virtual machine with IDE disks, it can only be deployed to a GSX Server host.

VirtualCenter customization operates on the disk attached to the virtual SCSI node with the lowest address on the SCSI controller with the lowest index. As a result, you must make sure that the guest operating system being customized resides on a disk attached as SCSI 0:0 node in the virtual machine configuration.

Note: If a virtual machine has mixed IDE and SCSI disks, the first IDE disk is considered the boot disk, and VirtualCenter passes it to the customizer. "First" is in controller:device order, that is, ide0:0, ide0:1, scsi0:0, scsi0:1, and so on.

For Windows guest operating systems: Both the active partition (the partition containing boot.ini) and the system partition (the partition containing the system directory, for example, \WINNT or \WINDOWS), are on the same virtual disk and attached the SCSI 0:0 virtual SCSI node.

Note: It is not a requirement that active and system partitions be the same partition.

For Linux guests: The virtual disk containing the system partition (the partition containing the /etc. directory) must reside on the SCSI 0:0 node.

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