Guest Customization on Minimal Install RHEL Not Completing
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Guest Customization on Minimal Install RHEL Not Completing

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Article ID: 369899

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Updated On:

Products

VMware vCenter Server VMware vSphere ESXi 7.0 VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0 VMware vCenter Server 8.0

Issue/Introduction

When cloning a Linux VM from an image with Guest Customization, the customer sees some or all of the below symptoms.

  • Hostname and IP address do not update.
  • The machine-id file in guest OS does not update to show a different value from the parent VM.
  • After provisioning and powering on, the network adapter of the new VM shows not connected despite the image having "Connect at power-on" box checked.

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 7.0

VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0

VMware vCenter Server 7.0

VMware vCenter Server 8.0

RHEL 9.2

RHEL 9.4

Cause

Guest Customization interacts directly with the guest operating system to make many of its changes. As seen in product documentation for vSphere 7 and 8, Linux guests with minimal installs may be missing packages required to run commands issued by Guest Customization. When these commands fail to run, Guest Customization will end at that step, meaning steps further into its workflow such as connecting the network adapter will not happen. For example, the "dbus-uuidgen" command is responsible for issuing a new machine-ID in Linux; this command will not run without D-Bus being installed, so the VM will deploy with the same machine-ID as the template VM.

https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/8.0/vsphere-vm-administration/GUID-E63B6FAA-8D35-428D-B40C-744769845906.html

Note:Certain Linux OS versions do not include the D-Bus package in the minimal Linux installation option. Therefore, running commands such as dbus-uuidgen might fail during customization.

Resolution

For instances where customer is running a Linux guest OS without D-BUS installed, they will need to manually install D-Bus in the guest OS of the VM.

  1. Clone a new VM from the current image.
  2. Install D-Bus in the new cloned VM.
  3. Create a new image from the cloned VM.
  4. Validate the new image works as expected before removing the original image.

Additional Information

This issue has been confirmed on RHEL 9.2 and RHEL 9.4, however can happen on any Linux guest that does not have D-Bus installed.

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