Can NOT get 2012 R2 templates to kick off since patching ESXi 5.5 environment

[TroyB]

About a week ago, I patched up all of our hosts / environment from ESXi5.5 to Update 2.  Everything went nice and smoothly with no issue however, I noticed directly after that, when I deployed 2012 R2 servers from my templates at both sites (I have 2 separate templates @ 2 separate sites) that they would no longer kick off the customization process where it would reboot the server and go through all the sysprep stuff.

I've tried several things now including rebuilding the template from scratch but still no go.  All of the other templates work just fine from Server 2012 on down, just not 2012 R2.

Any thoughts or suggestions before I hit up support for this?

Thanks a ton for any help offered!

[BenLiebowitz]

Have you tried editing the Customization and going through the wizard again to make sure nothing is missing and the customization hasn't been corrupted?  One way to see if the customization is corrupted, is to choose to Customize using the Customization Wizard and entering all the details by hand.  Also, you shouldn't have to reboot the new VM yourself...  Power on the new VM and wait.  Once vCenter copies the sysprep info to the VM, it will run sysprep itself and restart automatically. 

Have you checked the vCenter logs to see if there are any errors? 

[TroyB]

Thank you for the response!

Yes, I've tried editing and even re-created the customization and still the same thing.  Yea, I don't reboot the VM myself I just wait.  That's the point to where it no longer does anything to where it did before (Reboot and kick off the customization process like you said).  Eventually I can reboot it myself and of course I see the "Guest Customization in progress" message for like a second then it just comes back to the login screen unchanged.

I'm not really sure where to look in the VCenter logs (I use vCenter Appliances if that helps) to see anything about this issue so any details you could offer on this process would be greatly appreciated!

[BenLiebowitz]

One thing I've done is export the logs via the vSphere client (or web client) and open a VMware support case and send them the logs for analysis.  They're much more experienced at finding the errors.

In the mean time, you can use the VMware standalone converter to try and apply the customizations.  Launch the converter, click CONFIGURE MACHINE, enter your credentials to login to your vCenter, browse and find the cloned VM (in a powered off state), Click NEXT, click the check-box to CUSTOMIZE GUEST PREFERENCES FOR THE VIRTUAL MACHINE, click NEXT, Fill in the information manually. 

[TroyB]

I was actually able to get around this for the time being by doing the following:

Once the VM is up and I'm waiting for the customization to kick off, I log into the VM and run the following command from the command prompt:

  c:\windows\system32\sysprep\sysprep /generalize /oobe /reboot /unattend:c:\sysprep\sysprep.xml

That seems to kick it off and it runs through the customization script as it's supposed too.  I'd still like to get things back the way they were before but this is better than nothing.