Unable to join domain when deploy a template using guest customization specification

Ivo Beerens
Date : March 22, 2012
Categories : template ,vcenter-2 ,vSphere
Tags : template ,vcenter ,vpshere

At a customer I was unable to join a domain when deploying a template from vCenter using a guest customization specification. This only happened with Windows 2008 R2 and Windows 7 templates.

To solve this problem, you need the do the following in the guest customization specification:

Enter the FQDN name in Windows Server Domain field (1)
Enter the user@domain_FQDN in the username field (2)

I used the NetBIOS domain name in the “Windows Server Domain” field and “domain\username” in the username field what doesn’t work with Windows 2008 R2 and Windows 7 anymore.

More information can be found here state that you need to fill in.