When you run the windows installer, there’s a page in the installer that asks for you to provide your username and password.

There’s a reason for that and it has to do with how the Windows security model works and how Vimalin has been designed.

Here follows the technical explanation (you can skip this if you want)

Vimalin has three main components:

  • One is the user interface, you use that to plan your backups and restores, this is the part you directly interact with.
  • The other main part is the worker process. This one is invoked via a Windows service and takes care of running the actual backups/restores and interacting with the VMware applications under the current user.
  • Finally there is a service that runs the VMware automation for shared virtual machines

The worker process has to be run under the current user account. The reason for that is two-fold. If the worker process would run under the default internal account, which is by default used for windows services, then it would not have access to the network. This means that you would not be able to make backups to a network share.

Running under the default services account also means that you cannot access the VMware automation for VMs that you run under your account. As such the backup software would not be able to determine which VMs are running and which not. Worse, Vimalin could also not take action on that status and make the required snapshots so that it can make a reliable backup.

So it is essential that this service runs under your user account.

So in recap, for Vimalin to work you have to provide the username and password that belongs to your normal windows account under which you are running your virtual machines.

What if you want to install Vimalin on a computer that is logged into a domain under Active Directory?

The same principle counts, but now you have to also include the domain as part of the username during the install, so enter “<domain>\<user>” instead.
For example: If your domain is “contoso.local” and the username you login with is “John” then the username to use is “contoso.local\John” (without the quotes)