Moving a guest customization to another vCenter

Do you have multiple vCenters in your environment? Do you deploy VMs from different vCenters? Even if your vCenters are in in linked-mode and have shared storage containing your templates, you’ll still need to manually make guest customizations available on both vCenters. A pain, but easy to rectify. To move a single guest customization to another vCenter, perform the following tasks.

1. In the Customization Specifications Manager on the source vCenter, right-click on a customization then click Export.
2. Save the customization somewhere.
3. Copy this customization to the destination vCenter server
4. In the Customization Specifications Manager on the destination vCenter, right-click in the whitespace then click Import.
5. Select the customization XML file.
6. When the message “The Public key in the specification does not match the vCenter public key. Click OK to open the Customization Specification Wizard, reenter the password and continue the import.” appears, click OK.
7. Click Next until you reach the Administrator Password section.
8. At the Administrator Password section, re-enter the administrator password then click Next.
9. Click Next until you reach the Workgroup or Domain section.
10. If you want to join your VM to a domain, enter the relevant credentials then click Next.
11. Click Next until you reach the Ready to Complete section, then click Finish.

Now, that’s good for one guest customization. But what if you have a hundred? Use PowerShell. Arnim over at van-lieshout.com has a great guest customization export and import scripts.