reference architecture

VMware and datastores.xml

As I mentioned in other posts - I use VMware server for prototyping installations. I have VMware Server 2 running under Windows 7 Ultimate X64 on my laptop.

The other day my VMware console wouldn't come up. Turns out that the datastores.xml file was corrupt (it is at c:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware Server\hostd). If it is corrupt then the VMware Host Agent service won't start.

You can just delete it, restart the VMware Host Agent, and then you should be able to get into the VMware console again. However, all is still not good. Without a datastore defined you can't add existing servers or create new servers. You can use the following format to define your datastores so that you can get at them again. The path should be where ever your VMware server files are located.

<ConfigRoot>

<LocalDatastores>

<_length>1</_length>

<_type>hostd.host.LocalDatastoreEntry[]</_type>
<e id="0">

<_type>hostd.host.LocalDatastoreEntry</_type>
<id>1</id>
<name>standard</name>
<path>C:\Virtual Machines\</path>
</e>
</LocalDatastores>

<NasVolumes>

<_length>0</_length>

<_type>hostd.host.NasDatastoreEntry[]</_type>

</NasVolumes>

</ConfigRoot>

Port Numbers

I have been working on a distributed application and needed to assign some port numbers.

This link was very helpful - http://www.iana.org/assignments/port-numbers.

VMWare and Active Directory Domains

I have some Windows 2008 R2 Servers that I use to prototype software installations. I usually use them in stand-alone mode - meaning, not part of a common domain. Because of this I had created one, updated it, activated it, and then saved it as a baseline for any new servers that I needed. This has been working fine for me for years now.

Well, I finally needed to install some software in a domain configuration. So I took some of these images, made one the domain controller, joined the other ones to the domain, and everything seemed happy. But when I tried to reconfigure SQL Server to use a domain user account I kept getting an error that was something like - No mapping between account names and security IDs was done.

No matter what I tried I couldn't get it to work. Finally, it hit me like a ton of bricks - the classic Duh! moment. All of these servers were copies of each other and therefore had the same SIDs. I hadn't reset the SIDs when I created a new server because it never mattered before.

So, if you are using any virtualization software and you are used to using stand-alone servers - make sure you watch out for this issue if you ever decide to move them to a domain.