VMware View – Windows Pool ‘Stuck’ on Customizing

KB ID 0000646 

Problem

While trying to deploy a Windows XP Pool yesterday, I hit upon this problem. Windows 7 works fine, but as soon as I tried to roll out a Windows XP pool, they stopped like this;

VMware View XP Customizing

After a couple of hours, the whole operation timed out, and each machine shows as;

VMware View - Customization Timed Out

Status
{Date}{Time} o’clock {Time-Zone}:
Customization operation timed out

I tried to deploy the pool with both ‘quick prep’ and ‘sysprep’, but the results were the same. The replica is created, the pool creates the machines, but they DO NOT join the domain.

Solution

Despite my best efforts, I had to admit defeat and call VMware. Turns out they knew what the problem was straight away.

1. In my case the pool was going to be a linked clone pool. Go to the reference XP machine that you are using for this pool, and power it on.

2. Start > Run > appwiz.cpl {Enter}.

3. Locate and uninstall the VMware View Agent software.

Uninstall View Agent

4. Reboot the machine.

5. Download and install Microsoft Update 944043 on the XP Source machine. (Note: here’s the x32 bit version for XP).

6. Reboot the machine, (or the next step will fail and ask for a reboot!)

7. Reinstall the VMware View Agent.

8. Now if you are creating a linked clone pool, release the IP address > shut down the guest machine > snapshot the guest machine > recreate your pool.

Conclusion

VMware tell me that this is well documented in this kb article. But both at the time, and since, I’ve analysed the logs on the connection server, and the agent logs on the deployed machines, and found no mention of the following error,

“View Composer agent initialization state error (18): Failed to join the domain”

Hopefully this will help out someone stuck in the same position.

Related Articles, References, Credits, or External Links

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Author: Migrated

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