Cannot connect to a Lab Management Environment using the MTM Environment Viewer

Today we had a problem that we could not connect to VMs within a Lab Management environment from the Environment Viewer in MTM. We had composed the environment from VMs independently create and tested on the HyperV host. The plan in the end is to have this as a network isolated environment, but for now it is a private domain that exists on our main LAN.

The first issue we had was that as this was a private domain the various hosts were not registered on our DNS, so we got a DNS lookup error for the VM host names. This is best fixed with network isolation, but for a quick fix we put some entries in a local hosts file on the PC we were using to resolve the name to IP addresses.

The next problem was one of concepts. The environment had been composed by one user (and could access everything via a host connection via Hyper-V, with no local host file fixes), but it was to be used by another user, a tester who was not the owner of the environment (yes again I know we should they should be provisioning their own network isolated version). This mean that a Hyper-V based host connection was not possible, as you have to be the owner to get a host connection.

This meant that the new user had to use a guest connection, a Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) created behind the scenes by the MTM Environment Viewer. This worked for the domain controller (a server OS) but failed for the other three VMs in the environment which were all running Windows 7 with a ‘lost connection to virtual machine error’

Turns out the issue was the level of security set for RDC connection in Windows 7. We remoted onto the VMs with the problems using the standard Windows RDC client (not MTM) and set the Allows connections from computers running any version of RD.

Once this was done the Environment Viewer could make guest connections and all was good in the world.