I have been using Virtual Server 2005 R2 for a few months now and have been quite pleased with it's performance and manageability.  The server is used primarily to replicate environments for clients that would otherwise require a lot of different hardware to support. 

When the server was recently upgraded I discovered that our virtual machines were not configured to start automatically.  Although this seems like a simple configuration there are a few tricks that alluded me at first.

Here are the steps required to have a virtual machine start up automatically when the Virtual Server host starts:

  • Launch the Virtual Server Administration Website
  • If it is already running, shut down the virtual machine you would like to start automatically.
  • Go to the configuration screen for the virtual machine and click the "General Properties" link.
  • Check the "Run virtual machine under the following user account" check box
  • Enter a user name and password.  I simply used the administrator account.
  • Change the "Action when Virtual Server start" to "Always automatically turn on virtual machine".
  • Change the "Action when Virtual Server" stops to "Shut down guest OS".
  • Click the "OK" button to save your changes

    • There are two of these steps in particular that were confusing for me.  The first being the requirement to use a specified username and password.  As I understand it, a virtual machine is run under the permissions of the user who starts it.  By specifying a user account you are specifying are essentially telling Virtual Server which account to use when this process is automated.  For more information read this TechNet article.

    The second confusion was setting the "Action when Virtual Server" stop to "Shut down guest OS".  This was originally set to "Save State" but this setting will not resume the guest OS loses power, as the virtual machine's state was never saved.  If you stick with "Shot down guest OS" you should avoid any potential problems.