It took me about an hour and a half to install and configure Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 on Vista.  A little frustrating.

So I'm throwing this out there in case someone else finds it useful.

This is specifically in regards to the latest version at this moment, Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1, and Vista with Service Pack 1.

You should have already installed IIS on Vista because you use this to manage the virtual machines.  However whenever I tried to use the url http://localhost/VirtualServer/VSWebApp.exe, Internet Explorer and Firefox both kept trying to download the VSWebApp.exe.

Apparently you also need to make sure the CGI portion of IIS is installed on your Vista IIS install:

After that, or before it doesn't really matter, make sure you apply the patch from KB948515 so that is works Vista SP1.

You have to run the patch, a .msp file, from the command line using the msiexec utility like so:

msiexec /p path of .msp file

After that, I was able to connect to the administration website, but still was getting an error that stated, "Could not connect to Virtual Server. Access Denied."

I am logging into Vista with UAC on and trying to suffer through all the 'Allow this...' pop-ups that occur now and again.  So the quick fix is to run IE as an administrator:

This will launch IE in administrative mode so that Virtual Server is now happy. 

There's a couple of other ways this might be solvable but I did not attempt them.  One is to run dcomcnfg per this article.  It states WinXP but I do see the options in Vista.  I cannot use my domain account at home so I'm having trouble attempting this.  Second is to add your account in Virtual Server security per this article, but I seem to be already in there and it's not working soo... go figure.

For now it'll have to be a right-click, run as admin launch method.  That works for now.

Later