Ghost Solution Suite

It my first time working with GSS, and I’m having a little problem with ghost clients not showing in the console. Here’s my setup (using Virtual PC 2007): 1 virtual Win2k3 Server, and 2 virtual Vista clients (Vista1 andVista2). I’ve created an image from Vista1 with the ghost client installed on it (image syspreped from ghost console)  and restored it on Vista2. The thing is the concole will only see one of the client at the time. If I turn Vista1 on and not Vista2, Vista1 will show in the console. If I turn Vista1 off, delete it from the console and turn Vista2 on, Vista2 will show in the concole. But when they both turned on, only the first one turned on will show in the console.  It looks like an client ID problem, but I haven’t been able to figure out how to fix it. I uninstalled and reinstalled the client software on both machine, but it didn’t fix the problem.  I’m also using an unnatend file and it seems to work fine, both VM have different name and are added to my domain without any problem.  Does anyone have or had the same problem and know how to fix it?

 

Thx alot.

Thx for the tip, but unfortunatly, it didn't do it. They already had different MAC adress, surely changed by the sysprep I did when I created the image (should had clear the ghost client id too, no?). Both VM are seeing the server and indicate they are managed by it when I leave the mouse over the ghost client icon in the icon tray.

---

They already had different MAC adress, surely changed by the sysprep I did when I created the image

---

Actually, no. Sysprep runs in the virtual machine and it's completely unaware that it's in a virtual environment - the virtual network adapter provided by VirtualPC appears like normal network hardware, where the MAC address is baked into the hardware and can't be modified.

Instead, if you try and add two VirtualPC machines to the VirtualPC console and they have duplicate MAC addresses in the .vmc files, VirtualPC automatically edits one of the VMC files to have a different address (if it didn't do this, the virtual network wouldn't work).

However, what it doesn't do, but should do, is do the same for the SMBIOS GUIDs in the VMC files. In contrast, VMWare does handle most forms of this situation properly by recognising when you've copied the .vmx files around and asking you whether you want to replace the UUID or not.

This means that if you run VirtualPC and don't create new VMX files, you will probably have machines with duplicate SMBIOS UUIDs, and this means that you need the 2.0.1 update to GSS2 to copy with the fact that IDs which are required by the specification to be unique, aren't.

---

(should had clear the ghost client id too, no?).

---

There is no such thing stored in the client at present - although I have considered adding one as an option, Sysprep certainly wouldn't have a clue what to do with it. Instead, right now in GSS2 it uses the SMBIOS GUID or the network adapter MAC addresses to identify the hardware it's running on.

Problem solved. LiveUpdate finaly downloaded the 2.0.1 update this morning. Thx alot for your help.