Have you been pulling your hair out trying to get a Windows Server 2008 R2 virtual machine deployed from a vCenter template to join a Windows Active Directory domain? Fear not, the solution is at hand and is realtively simple.

After reading the following thread on the VMware Communities site:

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/251925

I found out that one needs to use the FQDN of the AD domain and NOT the NetBIOS name of the domain, and also the user principal name for a user with proper permissions to join computers to the domain.

A friend of mine uses Samba and winbind on his CentOS Linux boxes for user and group information and Kerberos for authentication. He upgraded his domain controllers recently to Windows Server 2008 R2 and suddenly his winbind authentication broke.

We've been having problems deploying Windows Server 2008 R2 virtual machines from templates using the VMware vCenter and it's built in guest customization.

It appears that there may be an issue either with Microsoft's built-in sysprep utility in 2008 R2, or with VMware's vCenter guest customization wizard when using a Key Management Server, or KMS. A KMS is part of Microsoft's Volume Activation 2.0 as described here - http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/existing-customers/product-activation... and in this TechNet article - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb892849.aspx