Sysprep files cannot be located (even through they are there)

Came up against an interesting issue yesterday, when we worked through guest customisation, we found that the button to allow guest customisation in the vSphere Client was greyed out.

The statement from the vSphere client was that the customisation files could not be found.

We checked the vCenter server (linux version) the files definitely in the location required.

/etc/vmware-vpx/sysprep/svr2003

We tried logging out of the client and back in to no avail.

The next thing we did was check the properties of the template, first we converted the template to a VM and then.

vSphere Client > right click VM > edit settings> options TAB

The OS can be seen set to Windows 2003 32 bit, the problem was it was set to Windows 2003 64 bit

 

The template had the guest OS set to Windows Server 2003 64 bit, so this meant that when customisation was ran the client and vCenter was looking for 64 bit sysprep files (the VM/template had Windows 2003 32 bit installed).

We set the VM OS setting under options to Windows 2003 32 bit and converted back to template hey presto everything was fixed.

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