Installation of SCVMM 2008 beta disables non-admin access to remote machines via Hyper-V manager

calendarOct 14, 2008 · 2 min read · Permissions Remote management SCVMM 2008 Virtual machines  ·
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Yesterday I finally got around to installing SCVMM 2008 beta onto a virtual machine (mainly to help us with some virtual machine migrations we've got coming up).  I must say that I think SCVMM 2008 beta is very nice indeed!

On my Vista machine I use Tore Lervik's Hyper-V Monitor Gadget for Windows Sidebar, and have done for some time.  With the number of virtual machines we run, I have found it an invaluable addition to my sidebar.

This morning however, when I tried to connect to one of the virtual machines listed by the gadget, I got an error message 'An error occurred trying to find the virtual machine on the server '.  In addition, when I tried to use Hyper-V manager, I received the error 'The virtual machine management service is not available'.

We thought for a while that it was related to remote rights (WMI/DCOM) on the servers in question (well, technically it is...) and I spent a while trawling through John Howard's articles relating to the required rights for remote management (well worth a read by the way).  Unfortunately even working through the articles didn't solve my problem.

After a little more rummaging, it turns out that installation of the SCVMM agent onto the servers hosting the virtual machines I want to remotely manage is what is causing the problem.  Anyone who is a local admin on the servers in question can freely manage the remote virtual machines; if you're not a local admin, you can't.  There are two potential solutions to the problem:

  1. uninstall the SCVMM agent from the servers in question (which would no longer allow us to manage them from SCVMM)
  2. Make anyone who needs to remotely manage virtual machines a local administrator on the servers in question

Lets be honest, neither option is entirely appealing (it's not that we don't trust some of the people who need to remotely manage specific machines, I just always would prefer to work from a 'minimum rights necessary' point of view), but as we have some migrations coming soon for which SCVMM is going to really help, we've gone for the latter.

I hope that this is something that is corrected in the RTM version of SCVMM 2008!