I'm trying to resolve a permissions issue for non-administrators of the host platform (W2K3 R2 64-bit, dual DC Xeons, 16G ram).
We have an engineering group defined for the domain and that group is given full control of the VM folder tree per the VMware guidance. When a user logs onto VMware Server Console using their normal logon (member of the engineering group, but NOT in the administrators group), we get power up failures for those VMs set to run as the logged-on user.
On the server, vmware-authd.exe creates an instance of vmware-vmx.exe running under the user account. vmware-vmx.exe creates files (.vmem, .vmem.lck, and vmdk.lck) but fails to power up the VM. When the Console is exited, the vmware-vmx.exe instance remains running, and because it owns the lock files, it must be killed using taskmgr before we can delete the lock files.
Two workarounds work: logon as administrator (not desirable), or configure the VM to run under the local system account.
I would like to resolve the problem running as the logged-user and not have administrator involvement to configure VMs to run on this platform or kill processes & delete locks when the VMs fail to launch.
Any suggestions where to look?
Thanks,
John