2003 Domain Controller on Workstation 10

[GJE1]

Hi,

I'm getting a constant error when I try to promote a Windows Server 2003 guest to a Domain Controller on Workstation 10.0.4.  The error is:

"Security Accounts Manager initialization failed because of the following error: Directory Service cannot start. Error Status: 0xc00002e1. Please clock OK to shutdown this system and reboot into Directory Services Restore Mode....."

I get this consistently whether I do a completely clean install of the guest OS with no patches, a fully patched SP2 install or create a linked clone from a template - I have used this same template many, many times with previous versions of VMWare Workstation (on the same host) without issue and have done many clean installs on previous Workstation versions without problem, so at the moment I can only assume that this is related to something in Workstation 10, especially as I can happily follow the same process on VirtualBox to create a 2003 Domain Controller (using same install media for clean install) and get a DC without any issue.

I have good AD knowledge and have followed the guidance in the Microsoft KB articles (specifically KB258062) for the above error, and am able to resolve it and get AD working fine, but then on the next reboot of the VM the error returns.

Attached is the log file from the guest.

Any ideas????

[GJE1 · Accepted solution]

Hello All,

Just putting an update on here for everyone else's reference.  I've resolved this problem, and a number of others that I was having where Server Manager on a guest server OS would fail with CLR errors or updates would fail.

The cause seems to be that I was storing the VMs on a Server 2012 R2 Storage Pool (Server 2012 R2 is the host machine), where I had a couple of disks effectively providing a RAID 0 configuration.  I have now split these disks so that they are just 'normal' disks and I manually split my VMs between the disks and all my issues have gone away. 

This only seemed to affect my SATA III 2TB disks as I have a couple of SSDs in a Storage Pool and they seem to work fine (may be a throughput/caching related effect??)