We are having a problem with running a domain controller on Windows 2003 Server as a virtual machine under VMWare Server. Our exact configuration is an HP DL585 with eight processor cores running Windows 2003 64 bit, running VMWare Server, and the actual VM in question is Windows 2003 32-bit. We have a domain with two domain controllers in a single domain forest. One domain controller runs on a standalone computer, and the redundant domain controller runs as a VM under the environment just described.
When you run the dcdiag tool with verbose settings, it finds no problems communicating between the two machines:
dcdiag /a /v
If you expand that to test lower level details with:
dcdiag /a /v /c
suddenly some of the attempts to use RPC protocol on the VMWare domain controller fail with an error 6.
I've taken this up with Microsoft support, and their database is showing other cases with this rare RPC failure that appear to also trace to VMWare.
So my questions:
1) Can someone here with the same setup as we have please try to run dcdiag /a /v /c between the physical and virtual domain controllers in the same domain, and tell me if you see the error 6? It would be good to establish a baseline and determine does this always happen with a virtualized DC, or is it only happening on some installations.
2) If anyone has managed to work around this issue, I would appreciate knowing how that was done.
I did search the forums, and I see large numbers of users who claim RPC is fine, and a good number who say it is broken. So there does appear to be some subtle but consistent issue there. Hopefully my post has enough detail for someone to start duplicating the result on other machines.
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Will