In App Layering, the ELM needs to be able to determine which NIC device is the "active" NIC.  The ELM must determine the active NIC in order to properly merge network instances and services from different layers, however there's no flag in the registry that identifies the NIC that will be used to stream the OS through PVS.  Since most environments use DHCP for IP address assignment in Packaging Machines, the ELM uses the DHCP "last lease time" as a proxy for which NIC is the active one: the network device with the latest DHCP lease is treated as the correct NIC.  This allows the ELM to construct a valid network configuration, including all the services and protocols, in a published image.

In environments that do not allow DHCP, and therefore all packaging machines must have fixed IP addresses manually assigned, the ELM will never be able to determine the correct network device.  Often, this isn't an issue, because Windows will fix up an invalid network at boot time.  But in environments with PVS or other especially network-sensitive systems, the initially invalid network configuration will prevent Windows from booting at all, often resulting in a BSOD referencing CVhdMp.sys:

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The objective of this article is to provide a mechanism for the ELM to identify the active NIC by manually setting the DHCP "last lease time" key in the registry.

Instructions

1. Create a new Platform Layer, or edit an existing Platform Layer.
2. On the packaging machine, open RegEdit.
3. Navigate to 'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\Tcpip\Parameters\Interfaces\'.
4. Locate the GUID of the NIC which will stream the OS from PVS. This is usually possible by scanning the GUIDs for the one with the correct IP address.
5. Within the NIC GUID key, create a  REG_DWORD named "LeaseObtainedTime" and initialize it with a non-zero value.  This key is the time expressed as seconds since 1/1/1970, but for App Layering, it simply has to exist and be non-zero.