I have a requirement in my SSIS packages to read and write files on network file servers. In development, I was able to get this working cleanly by using my AD account as the SQL Agent service account. My userid is in the server sysadmin role and have read/write
access to the filer servers.
But for production use, my organization doesn't allow the creation of Active Directory service accounts and I obviously cannot use an individual account, so that is not an option for my SQL Server & SQL Agent service accounts.
I decided to test out using a virtual service account on my dev server. I gave the machine account (virtual account) read/write access to the required network directories.
I changed SQL Agent to use NT SERVICE\SQLSERVERAGENT and restarted the service. But when I run the job that calls the SSIS package, now I get an error.
Checking the job history, I see that the SQL Agent seems to be trying to read the SSIS packages from the file share where we store them for development purposes. I don't understand why that should happen, since the packages are stored in msdb on the server,
and were called that way when the Agent was running under my AD Account.
I would really appreciate any guidance as to what other settings might need to be changed....documentation on virtual service accounts for SQL Server services is thin as far as I can tell.