Frequently Asked Questions about the Repackager

Verify if the machines are on the same subnet and if they can ping each other, for example. Additionally, check if the machines are enrolled in the domain and ensure there are no policies preventing the creation of new users. This is important because Repackager tries to create a new user under which we share the necessary folders to be accessed from the VM.

Although you were able to connect to the Hyper-V server, make a new profile and select the VM, the connection to the virtual machine may still fail if:

• Make sure there is a TCP/IP network connection between Hyper-V host machine and the client VM.
• Check the setting of your Hyper-V VM and make sure you have Standard Checkpoint option set and all the Integration Services options set (Hearthbeat and Data Exchange are mandatory); also check on your client VM and make sure that the Hyper-V Integration Services are running.
• Make sure you create a checkpoint of the VM where the user is already logged in and where AI Remote Tools are already installed - get the osprovision.exe from C:\Program Files (x86)\Caphyon\Advanced Installer 21.7.1\bin (host machine) and install them on the VM; use this checkpoint to run repackaging operations. The path to the osprovision.exe may be subject to version installed on the host machine.
• Before creating a checkpoint make sure you have Windows OS update to date; this will prevent background updates from running silently when the VM is powered on to run repackaging operations.
• At repackaging time if you get any Repackager errors when connecting to VM, then please manually open the VM from Hyper-V Manager and make sure you have successfully logged in the VM.

In the vm profile you can specify the user from the Host OS to be used for sharing. Ensure this username already exists on the Host OS before establishing the connection with the Repackager. The user will be used for sharing mechanism between the Host and Guest OS.

There are some cases when our Repackager fails to connect to a WMware workstation, the user getting "Cannot connect to virtualization server" error message.

This issue could be triggered by a problem with the VIX config file:

C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware VIX\vixwrapper-config.txt

The user should check for a valid VIX configuration. For example, let's suppose the user has the workstation version 15.5.0. The config file should also contain the following lines:

# Workstation 15.5.0
ws        19  vmdb  15.5.0 Workstation-15.0.0
player    19  vmdb  15.5.0 Workstation-15.0.0
            

"Workstation-15.0.0" entry of the above config file should be a valid subfolder of "C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware VIX\" folder. This should not be changed to "Workstation-15.5.0" unless it exists in the folder.

Please note that the import features in Advanced Installer (the Repackager, the Import MSI feature etc.) are intended to be used to get a starting point for your installation package, not to completely reproduce other installation packages. The Repackager tool captures only the effects of the installation (the changes made on the system). If the original installation package executes custom code (programs, scripts etc.) then only the effect will be captured (registry entries, files and folders etc.). Also, after repackaging an installation some adjustments may be necessary in order to obtain a working installation package.

When repackaging in Hyper-V machines the process could hang on waiting for the Advanced Installer tools (osprovision) to get installed. This usually happens because autorun is disabled by default on Hyper-V machines.

To get past this issue you can browse to This PC / My Computer and double click the Advanced Installer tools image that gets mounted automatically. Another way is to copy and install osprovision.exe from the following location, then save the snapshot:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Caphyon\Advanced Installer 22.0\bin

Once the tools are installed the repackaging process can continue.

This problem could be caused by the fact that when you use Other Servers option from Edit VM Profiles, the Repackager will copy the whole content of the folder that contains the package to be repackaged.

It is recommended to place the package and its dependencies in an empty folder before starting the repackaging.