When you clone a virtual machine, vSphere allows you to customize the guest operating system of the virtual machine, including the hostname, network settings, licensing and more. These customizations allow for license compliance and help prevent conflicts of certain configurations, including IP addresses and host names.

When vSphere performs the clone operation with customizations, it must have a guest customization specification that matches key configuration aspects of the virtual machine being cloned, including the guest operating system type and number of virtual network interfaces (vNICs). For example, when cloning a virtual machine with a Windows guest operating system and 2 vNICs, vSphere looks for a guest customization specification for Windows virtual machine with 2 vNICs.

VMware Adapter for SAP Landscape Management requires the use of guest customization specification to perform copy and clone operations in the LaMa, with or without templates.

The next two sub-sections discuss how to use the VMware vSphere Web Client to create guest customization specification for Linux and Windows virtual machines, each with a single virtual network interface (vNIC). You must use the applicable procedure to create guest customization specification that match each of the configurations (guest operating system type and number of vNICs) for the virtual machine in which you run your SAP Systems. For example, if you have some SAP system running on Linux virtual machine with one vNIC, another with two vNICs, and a third one with Windows guest operating system and 2 vNICs, you need three separate guest customization specifications matching these configurations.

Existing limitations for Customization Specifications:
  1. IP configuration can be obtained using DHCP for the first network adapter (NIC) only. Configuring retrieval of network configuration using DHCP for other NICs in customization specification results in an execution error of SAP system provision operations.
  2. When provisioning a new SAP system, SAP LaMa supports specifying IP configuration only for two network adapters. Therefore, it is not recommended to create customization specifications for VMs having more than two NICs and use them for SAP system provisioning, because eventually, it results in an operation execution error.