Virtualisation, VMWare, SysPrep – not as easy as it seems

Johan Bezem — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 11:36:24 +0000

If you know me, you know I am a Windows power-user, but certainly not an experienced administrator. If you are then confronted with a potential roll-out for a VMWare-based development environment to be legally cloned from a master environment using XP, things seem easy at first: Install, copy, distribute.
If you then look into things like hostnames, WinXP activiation, simultaneous network access, things become more complicated. And if you then start looking into something like SysPrep (not for Vista), things can easily overwhelm you.
So, more for me than for you :-) I’ve collected a set of links from remyservices.wordpress.com (David Remy) going through much of the necessary details using SysPrep. Thanks, David!

SysPrep in Depth – Part 1 – Adding Drivers To Our Image PC
SysPrep in Depth – Part 2 – Verifying SysPrep And Driver File Permissions
SysPrep in Depth – Part 3 – SysPrep.inf and HAL’s
SysPrep in Depth – Part 4 – Cleaning Up Unneeded Drivers
SysPrep in Depth – Part 5 – Customizing Sysprep.inf
SysPrep in Depth – Part 5 addition 1 – Customizing Sysprep.inf
SysPrep in Depth – Part 6 – Bringing Parts 1-5 Together
SysPrep in Depth – Part 7 – Obtaining Your Hardware Drivers
SysPrep in Depth – Part 8 – Automating your Product Keys

And in case in the future something more will be added to the series, check out the google link.

Happy administering!

JB Enterprises — Johan Bezem » virtualisation

Virtualisation, VMWare, SysPrep – not as easy as it seems