I have a few Server 2012 Standard R2 VMs, one happens to be a SQL Server with a total of 4 VMDKs, C:X:Y:Z volumes in the OS. My DBA called me to say all but the C: drive was giving her Access Denied after about a month of being in service. I logged on as Local Admin/Domain Admin and I got the same thing. I could not even access the security of the volumes. Logged on as Local Admin I could, and everything looked fine. I could UNC to these volumes admin shares with no issue. After some research I find that since server 2012, it has treated VMDKs as external storage. There was an issue with Hyper-V also, but Microsoft fixed those. If you go to your task bar and use your external media tool, you will see your drives there as external media to eject if possible.
In 2012 R2 there is a new security policy, that was not configured, but it seems to have acted anyway.. For removable media after so much I/O it locks the drives. There were a few work arounds for this, including disabling the audit policy, which again was not configured. And then this Vmware KB about adding a line to the VM advanced options to disable Plug-N-Play hot swap.
Neither fix worked in unlocking the locked drives.
I wound up as local admin adding authenticated users to the security permissions and that unlocked them for logged in and system account uesrs after that. But I don't know if this will lock up again for that fix after so much I/O again.
I have opened a ticket with Microsoft, and so far applied all the patches/hot fixes they advised, and then they suggested changing the SAS Controller from LSI to Parallel which borked the server by locking the C: drive and not allowing windows to boot or autorepair.
These are the Microsoft updates I have applied that they asked with no luck.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2883200
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2928680
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/20885.hyper-v-update-list-for-windows-server-2012-r2.aspx
Anyone else having this issue? I think this is a huge problem that windows server 2012 & R2 is seeing vmdks as external media attached. Especially with these type of audit policies being added in.
And maybe I hit it sooner since I have a SQL server with databases running on these drives.
Any help would be appreciated.
Here is another link describing the issue at hand, although this is more of a share issue, but related.
http://www.happysysadm.com/2013/02/access-denied-to-disk-share-on-windows.html