Heavy Soil

I have recently done a lot of P2V and V2V work, and have found many things that need tweaks – this one wasn’t well covered by anything I found by Googling, so I thought I’d better document it.

I had a 10 year old server, running Windows Server 2008, with Terminal Services installed and working fine. It wasn’t the easiest P2V I’ve ever done, but after disabling the firewall, switching off Admin Approval Mode, manually installing the migration agent, and a few more steps, I finally had a smooth P2V. However, after I’d configured the new virtual NIC to match exactly the IP configuration of the old one, I still couldn’t connect by remote desktop, even using the console.

Thankfully the VMware console view did still work…

It turns out that the Terminal Services configuration for running remote desktop services is bound to a network card, but if that network card disappears, the service can’t cope – and you can’t even choose another NIC to rebind it to. In Terminal Services Configuration, when you double-click on the RDP-tcp connection, and go to the Network Adapter tab, you get the following error:

Terminal Services Configuration: Terminal Service Configuration tool is not able to obtain the propertieds for this connection. The connection has either been deleted or the internal state of the connection has been corrupted. Please close all property pages, and select refresh from the menu.

Needless to say, hitting Refresh does absolutely nothing.

It should be noted here that this is only in the case of the Terminal Services role being used, not the usual administrative remote desktop connectivity.

The solution is relatively simple:

• Go through the other tabs in the connection properties window, noting down the settings
• Select the connection, and in the right-hand column choose Delete
• Create a new connection, applying all the settings, and assign it to the new NIC
• Reboot