I spent some time earlier this week working with BizTalk 2004 in a Virtual PC 2004 environment. The VPC OS was Windows Server 2003 Standard and it was running separate from a domain. When I was at work I would used Shared Networking, whereas at home it would share my tablet's wireless card. I had problems from the beginning getting BizTalk installed, and then regular problems along the way related to operating when BizTalk would attempt to integrate with SQL, SSO, or other system services. The errors would vary, but they would invariably be complaining about the RPC server. For example, errors such as "Failed to generate the master secret (error code 0X80070005)" would come up.

The problem was the result of failed RPC endpoint resolution. BizTalk was configured to connect to other services via machine name, in this case "VPC-WIN2K3STD", since "localhost" is not allowed as an endpoint. Unfortunately, given the configuration of the server with the VPC in my mixed environments resulted in the OS not being able to resolve the name "VPC-WIN2K3STD" to an IP address. If a step in the process of installing or running an app fails, do the following:

1. From the VPC OS' command line, run "ipconfig /all". This will tell you what its host name and IP address are. If you're using Shared Networking, expect 192.168.131.### where ### is between 2 and 251. If you're sharing the NIC of your host machine, expect it to be the same (I haven't verified that this is actually a problem when sharing a NIC).
2. Edit the "hosts" file in "<system path>\drivers\etc" (probably "C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc") to include an entry for your local machine's name and its IP. Just follow the example used by "localhost" to see how this is done. This file is the first place the system looks to resolve a host name as an IP address before going to the DNS server.
3. Retry the step that failed. It should work almost immediately, but I've found that sometimes it seems to take a few seconds to kick in (maybe the IP is cached somewhere?).

Keep in mind that if your IP address changes, you'll need to update this file. If you don't, things will likely stop working since your OS will be looking for a non-existent IP. This could happen when your VPC reboots, is rehydrated, or has its network connection changed.

12/28/2005 10:33:49 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  
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