Adding bginfo to your vSphere Templates

I don't know about you, but I personally find Sysinternal's BgInfo tool quite useful... having comptuer names, IP addresses, and maybe one or two other things sitting on my desktop helps me keep track of which machine I'm doing work on. Assuming that it makese sense in your situation, you might want to consider adding BgInfo to your vSphere/ESX templates. If you're already familiar with BgInfo - just put a shortcut into your allusers startup profile in the template. Here's the step-by-step procedure.

1. Grab a copy of BgInfo.
2. Create your BgInfo template (save-as), and place it and bginfo somewhere like this: c:\windows\system32\bginfo
3. Create a shortcut, and put it here so that it runs regardless of who logs in:
   %ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Start Menu\Programs\Startup
4. Edit the shortcut target like so: C:\windows\system32\bginfo\Bginfo.exe c:\windows\system32\bginfo\update.bgi /NOLICPROMPT /TIMER:0
5. Now whenever you deploy a new VM, and someone logs into the machine, bginfo puts the relevent data on their desktop.

In your case, it might make more sense to put your bginfo template on a network share somwhere instead of the local machine.