In order to use the virtual machines in Lab Manager on a domain you have to do some customization.

For starters – the templates themselves can *NOT* be on a domain, LM Tools will not install on a machine already joined to a domain.

If you already have a custom ISO created in Lab Manager, delete it. On the VMware Lab Manager server edit the sysprep.inf file here: C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Lab Manager Server\Tools\LMTools\Sysprep\Win2k3

Remove the line that says “ComputerName” – this is added automatically by LM Tools when the machine is deployed. If you do not remove this line you may end up with 2 seperate ComputerName fields and only the first one will be used which may cause the machine to be named something unexpected(There is a VMware KB regarding this).

Under “Identification” remove the line that mentions workgroup and add 3 new lines:

JoinDomain=domainname
DomainAdmin=domain\user
DomainAdminPassword=password

Save the file and then recreate the custom LM Tools ISO in Lab Manager. Once that is done boot up the template and if LM Tools were already installed, un-install them, reboot and then re-install the LM Tools so that the updated sysprep.inf file will be used.

Note: This method is if you want all machines to use the same sysprep.inf file, if you only want certain (or a single) template to join to a domain you can disregard editing the sysprep.inf on the Lab Manager server, as well as deleting and re-creating the LM Tools ISO and instead edit the sysprep.inf directly on the template instead. Installing LM Tools on the template is what copies the sysprep files from the Custom LM Tools ISO which is copied from the Lab Manager server at the time the LM Tools ISO is created.

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I recently ran into a problem where a user accidently reverted to a snapshot within Lab Manager, they didn’t realize this at first and by the time they did I had upgrade Lab Manager to the latest version (2.5.3). This ended up being a bit of a pain so I thought I would document the steps I took.

My first thought was I could fire up the snapshot version of the Lab Manager server, consolidate the disk on the VM in question and then import it into the current environment.

I knew the directory ID of the machine after it was reverted to snapshot (1133). However on the SAN snapshot this directory ID did not exist, I tried booting up the snapshot copy of the Lab Manager server but since it couldn’t contact the managed ESX hosts. Since it couldn’t connect to the hosts I couldn’t even view the properties of the machine to see what the directory ID was at that point.

So at this point all I knew was the machine name, but since Lab Manager stores all VMs but a numbered folder I had no idea where it was. I ran a search in the SAN snapshot looking in all .vmx files for the name of the machine, the command I used was:

find <path to SAN snapshot> -name *.vmx -exec grep -q “<machine name>” ‘{}’ \; -print

That returned 2 directories, just to test it I ran that command in the current SAN volume used by Lab Manager and it returned 3 directories. So now I knew the directory but wasn’t exactly sure how to get it into the existing Lab Manager configuration. Since the user didn’t want the current version of the VM, I went into that directory (1133) and made a backup of all files in it and then removed all of them. I copied everything from the directory I found on the SAN snapshot into the 1133 directory, and renamed the .vmx file to match the one that was in the before (for the 1133 VM). After I did that I was able to deploy the machine from within Lab Manager like normal.

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