Realnetworks Helix 13 server has little chance of running in a virtual machine, because of antipiracy protection.  Rebooting the VM is likely to cause Helix to regenerate the machine-id, which prevents the Helix Server service from starting.  I’m running Helix on Win2008 OS in VMware ESX.

If this happens to you, you have to call Realnetworks support and ask them to clear your license.  Then, the next time you download the license file from their PAM website, it first asks you for the new machine ID, which you can find by running (and aborting) the helix13 installer.  Real will only let you do this a couple times.  The only workaround then is to V2P your VM, or downgrade to Helix 12.

Helix 12 doesn’t appear to have this problem.  I’m uninstalled/reinstalled the same license for Helix 11/12 on different machines without encountering license problems, so my best guess guess is that Helix 11/12 didn’t care if the machine-id changed.

I wonder if Helix 13 is just a beta rushed into production, anyway.  For licensed users it appears as the current version, but everywhere else on real.com they promote Helix 12.  Even their 30-day eval and demo versions are Helix 12.