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.

For example, in Windows 2003/XP, etc and prior you would use the following in the vCenter Guest Customization Wizard:


Username: MYDOMAIN\myusername
Domain: MYDOMAIN


For Windows Server 2008 (R2) you use:


Username: myusername@mydomain.local
Domain: mydomain.local


Obviously substitute the proper information for your domain.

That's it. Crazy simple, but nowhere to be found in the VMware Documentation or Support Site anywhere as of the date of this post.

Hope this helps,
Flux.