Unknown device… is this a bug?

We have a customer with two ESX farms – one with AMD 8354 Opterons and one with AMD 8220 Opterons.

We use a manual sysprep – not the VC-integrated one, but a custom sysprep.inf file. And we found that all Windows 32-bit machines came up with Unknown device instead of the processor and we couldn’t roll back to the old driver. The only way to fix it was to run the setup.exe -s option on the AMD Processor driver. Now this is all well and good but that doesn’t fix the problem of why vanilla Windows installs screw up after imaging.

This is what the problem looks like:

So we examined our custom sysprep file – and we found it:

UpdateInstalledDrivers = Yes

That entry was in the sysprep.inf custom file. Removing it, caused the Unknown device issue to disappear. Having it there guaranteed the Unknown device issue appearing.

Here’s what we determined:

• There appears to be no performance impact from this issue
• This does not prevent any functionality in terms of software (Windows based) or VMware (such as VMotion/DRS/HA)

Just a heads up for you.

Cheers,

Leo