How can you give 2 virtual servers the same name in the same domain?

Question

We had 3 laptops each having a vmware biztalk enviroment. this runs on a server 2008 and we used our doamin account to log in to them. all three virtual machines had the same name biztalkdev. and everything went fine with no problems (i know at least two of them were logged in at the same time.)

Now we replaced the three laptops with new ones, put on the virtual machines and the second person logging in had locked himself out (the domain has a trust violation error with the logon. This is solved by loggin in as admin and changing the domain from company.be to company but locks out the other two users) To top that off, the old machines now have the same problem as well and only one of the six machines can be in the domain.

Our network admin says it is due to all 3 vms having the same name but biztalk requires the servername in the projects and these get commited in svn. This means having three diffrent server names would mean everything we take something out of svn that we have to check and change all projects (after a few clients we have 12 projects, so this is still doable but it will only get worse.)

Although all the explanation about diffrent server names being impossible in the same domain, i don't get why it worked for nearly 3 weeks with all three servers having the same name. Is there trully no way to keep the server names of all three machines the same yet have all the acces on other domain locations?

Answer 1

The main problem will be the name resolution. Windows does this on various levels and with various technologies. ActiveDirectory does this in general with DNS (Also WINS may be used, but is no more centric). In DNS, there can a name only be used for one machine (at the same level).

However, active directory in its core uses a guid to uniquely identify a computer - not the computer name. This explains, why your were even able to have two computers with the same name in the same domain. But I'm pretty sure that there was a lot of functionality not working correcly. Only that it seems, that nobody noticed it. It's really an invalid or corrupt configuration and normally, AD does not allow you to to this.

I would recommend to post a question on StackOverflow about how to manage your Biztalk-configurations correctly. Trying to have more than one server with the same name in the same domain is probably not a good strategy. Holding hardcoded configurations in code is also not very advisable.

(I assume your not using any clustering or load ballancing)