Virtual Server oh how I hate your un-patched bugs
We are using Virtual Server 2005 R2 a lot in our database platform testing. We have automated tests that start up virtual machines to do database platform testing. Quite handy. Configuring Virtual Server on an new machine can be quite a pain. We run into a problem all the time where we are trying to create a virtual machine with a name that was once already used for that particular Virtual Server host.
You get this dreaded message: The virtual machine could not be created. The virtual machine configuration could not be created. A configuration with this name already exists.
What? No it doesn’t. I had removed this virtual machine in the past. What is going on.
Microsoft has this lovely KB which tells you how to half fix the problem which basically boils down to:
C:Documents and Settings>del [virtual-machine-name]*.* /s
The crucial other half which for all I know only ever effect myself is that you need to make sure that under your virtual machines directory that there is no sub-directory with the same name as the virtual machine.
If you are trying to add the virtual machine 2k3-mssql2k5-fresh having the folder above present in your virtual machine directory will cause the Create Virtual Machine to fail. Remove the directory and everything will work.
I installed Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 (yeah that is the real name of the product) and it still exhibits this behavior.
