Access denied when logging into VMWare Infrastructure Web Access on Windows

Posted May 8th, 2008 in VMWare

A couple of days ago I decided to try out Beta 2 of the free VMWare Server version 2. After installing it on Windows Vista I attempted to log into the VMWare Infrastructure Web Access but got an error message saying "Access Denied". This post looks at how to successfully log into the web access console on Windows Vista.

When I first brought the web access login up in my web browser I was greeted with a login name and password dialog box. Not having had to specify these details when I installed VMWare Server I wasn't sure what to enter, so used my Windows Vista login name and password. I am an administrator on this particular machine so figured it may work.

Instead of logging me in I got the error message "Access Denied".

I knew from past experience when running VMWare Server 1 on Linux that to log into the console you needed to log in as a privileged user, and that Windows usually has a special "Administrator" account for this sort of stuff. A quick search on Google and this was confirmed from, so I just needed to enable the administrator account and assign it a password. My post from yesterday looks at how to enable the administrator account on Windows Vista, so refer to that for more details about how to do this.

After enabling the administrator account, I was then able to log into the VMWare Infrastructure Web Access console using the login "Administrator" and the new password I had set.