As more servers and services move off of physical servers and onto virtual servers, there’s been an issue that Mac admins have run into more than once:
“I’m trying to set up Open Directory in this VM, but the service won’t enable.”
Another related issue has to do with Profile Manager, where Profile Manager crashes when you try to set it up in a VM. The root cause is the same: Profile Manager needs to have Open Directory running and Open Directory won’t turn on.
The fix is simple – give your VM more than one processor. Once you give the VM multiple processors (two is fine), Open Directory should begin working. This will also fix the Profile Manager crashing issue, as Open Directory should now enable properly.
As far as I can tell, this is an issue no matter what virtualization solution is being used. It’s been reported on Parallels, VMWare Fusion and VMWare ESXi.
