The UC team here at NetCraftsmen relies pretty heavy on virtualization to mock up various testing scenarios for customers. A while ago, I mocked up a lab to simulate a Unity upgrade for a customer. We do this to standardize procedures and head off any issues BEFORE production work occurs. At the time, the customer had decided to upgrade a Unity 4x system to Unity 5.0(1). Following standard practices, I installed the Unity 5.0(1) server as a virtual machine and associated the various service accounts (Unity Install, Unity Directory Services, and Unity Message Store Service) per standard protocol. In addition, I associated the Unity Admin account to the Unity web administration interface (SA). I haven’t validated this on other versions of Unity other than 5x; however, I have replicated the issue. Lastly, I use VMWare Server (currently, 2.0.1) in my UC lab. My disclaimer is that your experience may vary based on the various applications you use. Here is what I have seen…
The Issue
The issue I found (and have verified on subsequent test installs) is that when you try to login to the “console” using the Unity Admin account, the Windows Desktop never loads. Subsequently, you can login as Unity Install, the desktop loads, and you can run Unity SA without issue. Oddly enough, when I checked the security logs on the server I could see that Unity Admin was successfully authenticating; however, no desktop.
The Resolution
Technically, I could have just used Unity Install for what I needed to do but we like to do things the right way. So, I found that that you can do the following to resolve the problem.
1. Enable Remote Desktop the virtual Unity server.
2. Using RDP, connect to the server and login as Unity Admin.
3. Allow the desktop to load via the RDP session and then log off.
4. You can now login to the “console” of the virtual Unity server using the Unity Admin account.