When you clone a virtual machine or deploy a virtual machine from a template, you can customize the guest operating system of the virtual machine. You can change the computer name, network settings, and license settings.

Customizing guest operating systems helps prevent conflicts that occur if virtual machines with identical settings are deployed, for example conflicts due to duplicate computer names. You can apply customization as part of virtual machine deployment or later.

  • During the cloning or deployment process, you can specify customization settings, your you can select an existing customization spec.
  • You can create a customization spec explicitly from the Policies and Profiles UI and apply it to a VM.