Vagrant Up fails with “VBoxManage.exe: error: Code CO_E_SERVER_EXEC_FAILURE (0x80080005)”

I’m trying out Vagrant, and ran into a problem.  The vagrant up command failed: 

Bringing machine 'default' up with 'virtualbox' provider... 
[default] Setting the name of the VM... 
[default] Clearing any previously set forwarded ports... 
There was an error while executing `VBoxManage`, a CLI used by Vagrant for controlling VirtualBox. The command and stderr is shown below.

Command: ["list", "hostonlyifs"]

Stderr: VBoxManage.exe: error: Failed to create the VirtualBox object! 
VBoxManage.exe: error: Code CO_E_SERVER_EXEC_FAILURE (0x80080005) - Server execution failed (extended info not available) 
VBoxManage.exe: error: Most likely, the VirtualBox COM server is not running or failed to start.

A Google search revealed a lot of other people having the same problem, but not too many solutions, so I’ll document how I got past it.

This is using:

• Vagrant 1.2.7
• VirtualBox 4.2.16
• Windows 7 Professional, 64-bit, SP 1

I could also reproduce the same error by running the vboxmanage list hostonlyifs command from C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox on a my command line — so this is a problem with VirtualBox and Windows, not with Vagrant itself.

Mitchell Hashimoto very helpfully pointed out that this might just be a permissions issue with Vagrant running under a different userid than VirtualBox, and that does seem to be the case.  I had started my command prompt using Run As Administrator.

Simply running from an un-elevated command line didn’t solve my problem, however. The fix was to grant some DCOM permissions on the VirtualBox Application component.

On Windows 7, that’s accomplished as follows:

• Open Component Services from the Administrative Tools folder.
• Drill down to Component Services > Computers > My Computer > DCOM Config.
• Click through a couple of warnings about unregistered classes from other apps installed on my system.
• Right click on VirtualBox Application.
• Go to the Security tab.
• Change Launch and Activation Permissions from Default to Customize

It’s hard to say whether any specific permission was needed or whether simply opening up the permissions for edit and then re-saving them did the trick, because once it started working, I returned my permissions back to the original defaults and it continued to work. Maybe something in my registry was corrupted and the DCOM Config editor fixed it.

#co_e_server_exec_failure, #dcom, #vagrant, #virtualbox, #windows