I was recently deploying VMs from a Ubuntu template using guest customisation, where guest customization fails and the IP address also fails to be updated with the following error:
An error occurred while customizing <VM>. For details, reference the log file /var/log/vmware-imc/toolsDeployPkg.log in the guest OS
On investigating the log file, the following error has been generated:
ERROR: Error : Could not create file /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf!
The cause of this issue is due to VMware Tools being unable to create a file in the /etc/dhcp3 directory as this does not exit.
In order to resolve the issue, you will need to create the directory by converting the template to a VM, making the below change and converting back to a template for deployment.
mkdir /etc/dhcp3
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