It may probably seem that once we have a ready master VHD the most straightforward way to create another virtual machine would be just copying this VHD instead of creating it from scratch. But if you do that, the duplicated VHD will contain the same Computer Security Identifier (SID) as the master VHD. If you try to join new system to the domain, you won’t be able to login with the following error message: “The system cannot log you on due to the following error: The name or security ID (SID) of the domain specified is inconsistent with the trust information for that domain.”

Computers running the Windows operating system use a Security ID (SID) to uniquely identify themselves. When you use disk-duplicating approach for new VMs deployment, it is important to take steps to ensure the uniqueness of these Security IDs.

• Sysprep Utility
• Creating Answer File for Sysprep
• Generalize Master Image