MS Virtual Server 2005R2 - VM won't start

Question

Something apparently happened to one of our VMs, and our admin is no longer available.

I can log into the host server, and access the web-based management interface, but when I try to restart the VM I have the following options:

Restore from saved state
Discard Saved State
Merge Undo Disks
Remove

When I try to restore from saved state, I get an error:

The following error occurred:
The virtual machine could not be started. The virtual machine could not be started. The account name and password are invalid

Could it be trying to use the now-disabled credentials of the former admin? How can I find out which user it's trying to use?

I have restarted the "Virtual Server" and "Virtual Machine Helper" services, but that didn't seem to help. There is an error in the Virtual Server event log:

The VSS writer failed to get the properties of the virtual machine VMNAME, since the operation did not complete in maximum allowed time. The virtual machine is allowed for Offline backup only. Check if the virtual machine VMNAME is running and then retry the operation, if needed to be backed Online.

There is a 2nd VM running on the machine, and it seems to be OK, so it's apparently something with that VM instance.

What do I need to do to get this VM restarted?

Answer 1

If you don't care about the state the machine was in last, you can Discard State and then Start the machine. It's currently in a saved state, like hibernation, where it should be able to simply resume from where it was saved.

The account error is certainly a strange one. It might be the case that the saved data is owned by someone other than the VS account. Presumably your account wouldn't have access and it's throwing that error. This is just a theory, I've never seen that error in VS2005.

On a side note, VS2005 is 6+ year old technology and you should have upgraded to something else by now. Hyper-V is a pretty straight forward migration path, though others like ESX and KVM can be worked.