2010 R2 VMWare GRT Clarification Please

[RyanW]

I just got my VMWare Agent license for BE 2010 R2 and I notice the GRT options for AD/SQL/Exchange share the same credentials as the ones used to connect to the VMWare infrastructure.

Unfortunately I'm stuck at ESXi 4.0 for the moment, so there's no way to tie that into AD, so I'm using a ESXi only login.  That login won't authenticate with my AD at all.

How do I get around this? I want to be able to use GRT.  Another problem is, my ONLY AD server is a VM, if I shut that down for maintenance my authentication within vmware client itself will go 'kaput'...

Why can't you specify separate credentials for GRT backups/restores? or am I missing something?
 

[Hemant_Jain · Accepted solution]

Once you select the virtual machine under the ESX node, go to "Resource Credentials" and specify credentials for virtual machine separately. This can be a windows user account which will authenticate to your Windows VM OS and also Exchange and SQL if installed on that VM. The only problem is you cannot use separate account for different applications. All applications and the operating system will use common authentication, i.e. the account specified for virtual machine.

Please mark it a solution, if this is useful.

Thanks

[RyanW]

Dang. Why didn't I think of that? Fantastic!