Sysprep for preparing Windows Image

Microsoft Sysprep comes handy when one needs to prepare a Windows OS for Imaging & cloning.

We all know it drastically reduced the time & effort required in spinning up new windows servers and desktops.

But the world has changed,

·         application coding no longer relies on machine’s security identifier

·         with invent of IAAS & DAAS, faster provisioning of virtual machines is the need of present

Hence, the technology of today further minimized the image preparation time further with the invent of Quickprep.

While the Sysprep operation needs several minutes to change the SID on a Windows OS as it needs to change all files on the hard disk drive, Quickprep works much faster only takes care of key things to give a cloned VM a new personality as below :

Function	QuickPrep	Sysprep
Removing local accounts	No	Yes
Changing Security Identifiers (SID)	No	Yes
Removing parent from domain	No	Yes
Changing computer name	Yes	Yes
Joining the new instance to the domain	Yes	Yes
Generating new SID	No	Yes
Language, regional settings, date, and time customization	No	Yes
Number of reboots	0	1 (seal & mini-setup)
Requires configuration file and Sysprep	No	Yes

Limitations

·         The Quickprep tool comes with limited products like VMware Horizon View/ Tucloud DAAS and works only with Linked Clone desktop pools

A small percentage of software development still rely on the unique local SID like AV or NAC ones, for which sysprep will be a better deal