Event ID 1053 Error for Windows Guests

[BriansVblog]

Each of my Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP VMs are receiving an error in Event Viewer. Event ID:1053 - "Windows cannot determine the user or computer name. (The specified domain either does not exist or could not be contacted.) Group Policy processing aborted.

Physical servers and computers do not post this error. I'm using VirtualCenter 2.0.2 and ESX 3.0.2. Route Based on IP Hash and Beacon Probing have been enabled on the vSwitch.

Any ideas?

[abaum]

Were these machines P2V'd or built fresh in VM? When P2Ving, I sometimes have to drop the machines into a workgroup and re-add them back to the domain. Check to see if the NIC is enabled in the guest and in VC (Edit setting of the guest0. I occassionally forgoet to renable (or enable) the NIC so the machine never get on the network.

adam

[EGRAdmin]

Are your VM's all clones trying to access the same domain with the same SID?

Did you run sysprep or newsid when you cloned? or deployed them from template?

Or are they each new OS builds from scratch?

[BriansVblog]

Some VMs were P2V'd and some are newly built, both generating the same error message. The physical ports are trunked using 802.1q.

What is the process for using NewSID? Does NewSID need to be ran on all P2V'd VMs?

[EGRAdmin]

The standard is anything thats cloned or a duplicate of a system should have sysprep run.

Newsid is a secondary tool offered by sysinternals (on microsoft.com) that does a similar job.

This is only a customization thing so if it's a P2V build or a custom job you would already have a unique SID.

You may as the previous post stated have to remove and readd the afflicted servers to the domain.

That will require a reboot though.

[BriansVblog]

Thanks for the responses. I disjoined the VM from the domain, removed it from Active Directory, and re-joined it to the domain. I still receiving the same error message. I appreciate the help.

[bpete]

I'm not sure how much help this will be, but it worked for me when I experienced Event ID 1030 and 1058 related to Group Policy processing for both virtualized domain controllers and member servers. Other events related to AD replication also appeared in my event logs. This was true for ESX 3.0.2 and VMware Server 1.0.4.

Essentially, there seems to be a scenario where the installed VMware Tools can interfere with Windows domain operations, particularly Group Policy.

The workaround I used looks like this:

1. Deinstall VMware Tools from the affected VM and reboot the VM.

2. Log back in to the VM and allow the W2K3 VM to auto-detect and install the virtual NIC; reboot again when prompted.

3. Log in to the VM and run the VMware Tools installation, selecting Typical; reboot when prompted.

4. Check for new errors in Group Policy in the VM by running the gpupdate /force command from the Windows command prompt, and view the results in Event Viewer.

As I mentioned, this resolved Event ID errors 1030 and 1058 for me. I've read elsewhere that uninstalling the Shared Folders feature in VMware Tools can accomplish the same result, but have not personally tested it yet.