Update:

So, I am a moron.  That’s the idiot error you get when you don’t type the password right in your script.  Yep, got it now.

Original:

Well, crap.

insufficient rights to host operating system

The dreaded UAC controls and security model in Server 2008/Vista have reared their head and I think its going to be complicated to work within their rules.

My plan hinged on the automated shutdown, copy and then restart of my Ubuntu server VM.  There are two obvious hurdles to this plan.  The first is acquiring/writing a script to do this.   Secondly, I don’t believe that VMware tools has been successfully installed on the Ubuntu server – I spent a lot of time on that, custom compiling, adding packages, etc.  This seems to have been ineffective so far, but I think that  should be somewhat easy to over come.

Back to the first issue, the automation.  It seems that unlike the big boy version of VMware, VMware Server 2.x doesn’t have a built in task scheduler which would have just been too darn easy.  It does come with an executable that should be an enabler, however.  This script I found would work really well.  The issue is that the script blows out when it hits the “vmrun.exe” because even running the command prompt as administrator doesn’t pass on the necessary rights elevation.  Looks like I could do some fanciness in VB that would make this work…

I am going to try and run the commands singly in task manager to see if the “run as” there is effective.  Probably not, but I can hope.  Time to dig into that, which is just fantastic and will require some local group policy work.  Once I have a fix, it might actually be useful to others.  We’ll see.  Ideally I’ll find a fix that works within the default Server 2008 security model which would make it much more portable.

–Nat