Renaming the Windows guest failed. Most often this is because you've specified a FQDN instead of just a host name

Question

I am running vagrant version,

vagrant -v
Vagrant 1.9.3

vagrant plugin list
vagrant-butcher (2.2.1)
vagrant-cachier (1.2.1)
vagrant-omnibus (1.5.0)
vagrant-share (1.1.7, system)
vagrant-vbguest (0.13.0)

When I start a vagrant VM, windows 2012r2,

I get "Renaming the Windows guest failed. Most often this is because you've specified a FQDN instead of just a host name."

It used to work before on the same host(centos7, with Virtualbox) with version 1.4.

Do you understand the error message? You have `hostname.example.com` in some setting where you should have just `hostname`. — tripleee, Apr 11 '17 at 20:31
It is working on vagrant 1.4 on other host running centOS 7 as base machine. Why not on 1.9.3 — user3536147, Apr 11 '17 at 20:33
btw, I am using winrm and powerShell scripts to rename the VM — user3536147, Apr 11 '17 at 22:39
It is just a "suggestive" message that is sometime misleading, because vagrant doesn't have the permission to rename the guest. — mootmoot, Apr 12 '17 at 15:03
Hi, Thanks, but is is breaking the run, actually after he error the vagrant building should continue, but it just stops there. Next chef run should happen on the vagrant box, but it just breaks there — user3536147, Apr 12 '17 at 16:38
Did you ever figure this out? I’m having the same issue now. — user3505901, Apr 27 '18 at 13:00

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 27 '18 at 15:59

If you are (like me) experiencing this with Kitchen, in your .kitchen.yml, in the platform section, you can't have "name: mwrock/Windows2012R2". Instead, name it something like "windows2012R2" and, in platform's "driver_config" section, specify "box: mwrock/Windows2012R2".

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 08 '19 at 16:25

Another way you can resolve this issue is by setting the vm_hostname attribute to false like this:

platforms:
  - name: BPA-TEST
    driver_config:
      username: Tester
      password: [PASSWORD]
      vm_hostname: false
    driver:
      port: 55985
      customize:
        memory: 4048

https://github.com/test-kitchen/kitchen-vagrant

vm_hostname Sets the internal hostname for the instance. This is not used when connecting to the Vagrant virtual machine.

To prevent this value from being rendered in the default Vagrantfile, you can set this value to false.

The default will be computed from the name of the instance. For example, the instance was called "default-fuzz-9" will produce a default vm_hostname value of "default-fuzz-9". For Windows-based platforms, a default of nil is used to save on boot time and potential rebooting.

Renaming the Windows guest failed. Most often this is because you've specified a FQDN instead of just a host name

2 Answers2