As consultants we must stay current on wide range of the Autodesk products that are available. When delivering a customised piece of software we ensure that it works in the latest and previous version (sometimes two previous versions) of Autodesk products (eg. AutoCAD 2012, AutoCAD 2013) and in few other Autodesk products as well (eg. AutoCAD Map 3D and Civil 3D).
We use virtual machines (VMs) to setup our test environment and we tend to clone an existing VM and customise it, based on our project requirements. When cloning an existing VM server, a small glitch ocurs: when an existing server "ABC" is cloned to a new server "XYZ", the existing server is disconnected from the Active Directory Domain, which creates a hassle for users of the existing, working system.
This is because certain machine attributes (such as SID, MAC Address and IP address) that are used as a means of identifying the machine on the network should be unique. Having two machines that are completely identical will cause an Active Directory disjoin or more generally, a network conflict. Successfully duplicating a virtual machine requires removing any attributes that are unique.
The SYSPREP utility prepares the server for duplication, which means that it removes the server's SID and other attributes that are unique.
Before you perform the clone, run sysprep on the machine to be cloned. "C:\windows\System32\sysprep\sysprep.exe"
Tick the 'Generalise' option so that a new SID is created for the machine, which will ensure the clone is unique.