Running a TM1 server under VMWare Player

[tomok]

I’ve got a question about running a TM1 server inside a VMWare image. I built a base VM image with Windows 7 using the free VMWare Player 6 which I have running on my laptop. I then installed TM1 version 10.2.1, Office 2010, and a few other goodies. Everything works great. I decided to modify the installation so that the TM1 objects (i.e., the Data folder) would not be on the VM image, but be left on the laptop so that I could have multiple VMs, running different versions of TM1, accessing the same objects. The VMWare player lets you map a drive back to the host, which is drive Z. I set the DatabaseDirectory setting in the tm1s.cfg file to point to drive Z. I can run TM1 as an application (running tm1s.exe as a shortcut) but cannot as a service. I’m pretty sure the service problem has to do with permissions. Running it as an App is using my Windows user logon (the user on the VM image), which has access to the host, while the Local System account on the VM image does not, thus the service cannot start because it can’t get the objects.

I have perused the VMWare web site and cannot find anything useful there. Has anyone else tried this type setup before and if you have, were you able to get TM1 to run as a service, accessing the host’s hard drive (and not the hard drive of the VM image) or did you have to stick with running it as an app?

[jim wood]

Have you tried changing which users runs the service? It's behaving the same way as trying to run it on a physical server with a network drive as the data directory. The local system account has no network privileges.

[tomok]

Have you tried changing which users runs the service? It's behaving the same way as trying to run it on a physical server with a network drive as the data directory. The local system account has no network privileges.

I'm pretty sure I could get it to work by 1) creating a share on my laptop and then using that for the data folder, 2) assigning rights to that to my account on the VM, and 3) changing the TM1 service to run under that ID. I was hoping to use the "built-in" share back to the host that comes with the VMWare player without having to go to all those steps.

[Duncan P]

I seem to remember that the VMWare shared folder facility used the Windows mapped network folder mechanism. LocalSystem accounts don't have access to network resources. You could change it to run as the "Network Service" account.

[tomok]

I seem to remember that the VMWare shared folder facility used the Windows mapped network folder mechanism. LocalSystem accounts don't have access to network resources. You could change it to run as the "Network Service" account.

No go on the Network Service account. It was a good guess though. The only way I got it work was to create a public share on my laptop, open to the group Everyone, and then mapping to that. I was hoping to not have to do something like that by using the already mapped drive that comes with VMWare so that the image would be more portable to other machines. I think I'll just stick with running tm1s.exe as an app from the desktop of the VM image.

[lotsaram]

I have the same problem and workaround using Parallels as opposed to VMWare. Good in theory to keep all the model data directories separate on the host and able to be shared across multiple (more portable) VMs but getting TM1 to be able to run as a service and access the shared folders is a real pain. I figured it just wasn't worth the hassle and run the servers as applications under my windows login. Can look a bit messy though and it would be nicer to run the DBs as services.