Preparing a workstation to be turned into an image

Before we turn a workstation into an image, there are a few things that we need to do to generalise the image.

You should have made any customisations to the workstation before continuing with this article, as it will not be possible to make further changes afterwards. It’s highly recommended to follow the steps in the ‘Snapshotting your changes’ section of this article.

Snapshotting your changes

Once the SysPrep process has started, it will not be possible to log in to the workstation, as all user accounts, Active Directory domain joins etc will be removed as part of the process.

To ensure that you can easily make changes to your image, it’s highly recommended to snapshot the workstation's hard drive, so that it can be easily restored to a state pre-SysPrep.

See your Cloud provider or virtualisation platform's documentation on how to do this. Below are some examples:

AWS

Creating an EBS snapshot

Restoring an EBS snapshot

VMware

Snapshots in vSphere

Bare metal

Snapshotting bare-metal workstations can be a bit more involved and time-consuming, but the following tools can help:

Clonezilla

Preparing the image

Lens Workstation Agent

The Lens Workstation Agent runs on startup and registers the workstation with the Lens system. Each workstation has a unique pairing with the Lens system for security. Before we create an image, we need to remove the existing pairing so that the new workstation registers successfully. To do this:

Stop and disable the Lens service

1. Log in to the workstation as an administrator

2. From the Windows start menu, search for Services and open it.

   1. Alternatively, you can enter the following in the run prompt by pressing + R, and entering services.msc.

3. In the Services window, select the 7fivefive Lens Workstation Agent service. Right-click this and select Properties from the menu.
   

   

4. In the Properties window

   1. Set the Startup type field to Disabled

   2. Click the Stop button
      

   

5. The Lens Workstation Agent has now been stopped and will not start on the next startup

Reset the API key

If the workstation had been registered with the Lens system, then its registration needs to be removed before imaging.

Follow the 'Removing the API key' section from this KB article.

Sysprepping the workstation

Sysprepping a Windows machine is not reversible, and the workstation will need to be reconfigured before being usable. See this article to understand the SysPrep process.

On AWS EC2 instances

1. Use Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) to connect to your Windows instance. Using alternative protocols such as HP Anyware or AWS/Nice DCV may work, but RDP is recommended.

2. From the Windows Start menu:

   1. For Windows Server 2008-2012 R2, open EC2ConfigService Settings, and then choose Image.

   2. For Windows Server 2016 or later, open EC2LaunchSettings.

3. In the Administrator Password field, choose Random.

4. Choose Shutdown with Sysprep, and then choose Yes.

For the full article, see here.

All other platforms

Follow the guide here on how to SysPrep your workstation:

Running SysPrep on Windows