I am not finding much information on this so I am posting in here...
What are the best practices / guidelines for making windows server templates in vSphere 5.1 and higher? I know in the past everyone would just sysprep the template and be done with it. Correct me if I am wrong, but the custom specs should be a viable replacement for syspreping as it does the sysprep for you along with several other settings. The problem I am running into is creating a default user profile on the server for when we (the server admins) log into the server with our admin accounts. There doesn't seem to be any good solution other than using sysprep. I am trying to get away from it because I have came across some other posts where people had issues when using custom specs against a sysprepped template - and like I already stated, custom specs syspreps for you.
In this article, the author lists a couple options but states the only Microsoft supported option is to use sysprep. Does VMware have a stance on this? I assume they would prefer we use custom specs but what can we do to create a default user profile? Being that it is dealing with Windows profiles I am thinking we are going to be stuck with the MS solution - which stinks.