Tuesday, 7 March 2006

VMWare, TFS and Cloned Images

I'm having a real wierd problem trying to install TFS into a VMWare image and I wonder if anybody has seen the same thing and maybe has a solution. I have a VMWare image that is a Domain Controller and I create another image onto which I install TFS. If I create a clean VMWare image for the TFS the install works and I can create a new team project, however if I use a cloned image then the install succeeds but I cannot create a new team project.

What I tried is this. Create a 'base' Windows 2003 Enterprise image. Clone this and create a DC (this works). Clone the base image again and install TFS. That seems to work. However in the cloned TFS image I cannot create a new team project; each time I try I fail trying to connect to Sharepoint. The error I see is TF30177, I've hunted this down on various forums but none of the fixes works for me. If I do the exact same install on a clean (non-cloned) image then everything is fine.

For each cloned image I run the NewSid tool from SysInternals make sure the machine is in the domain and all the accounts are correct.

I've hit the same problems in Beta3 refresh and in the RC. Anybody with any ideas feel free to contact me.

Updated March 8th 19:00

I had two replies to this from colleagues. One from Dominick Baier who pointed me at this post thinking I had the same issue. I tried this, rebooting after each step, but no luck. The cloned image still failed.

Then I had an email from Mark Smith. Mark had had a similar issue and he pointed me here. Mark thought I had the same worker process problem that he had. But comparing the "linked clone" VM I had with the full clone the IIS setups looked exactly the same. However, something else in Mark's post caught ny eye: he said

"You must install IIS after installing Active Directory"

Now, the base VNWare image I was cloning had IIS installed. I would then clone and add the cloned image to the domain. Seeing the above comment I decided to first un-install IIS, then add the machine to the domain, re-install IIS and then do a full TFS install.

And it worked. I now have a linked clone with a full TFS install. Thanks to Dominick and Mark for suggesting things that pointed me in the right direction.

Posted by kevin at 1:10 PM in Net

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