I’ve been struggling this last few weeks with a troublesome Hyper-V remote management issue I’d caused myself in the pursuit of testing new toys & tools, the latest being Hyper-V Server.
Hyper-V Server is a truely marvelous bundle of goodness if there every was, however a word of warning/reminder (we should know better!) when testing changes.. only change one variable at once!
I’d been running a WS2008 server core install for various Hyper-V testing since being involved in the UK Hyper-V RDP earlier in the year. Anyway as time went on it proved to be rock solid, indeed so stable and with great performance that on a return from Redmond with an insanely cheap (company store & 2$ to the pound!) copy of Windows Home Server (WHS), I built my first WHS system as a virtualized box on there too.
Windows Home Server (WHS) is a brilliant!, it provides great backup, remote access, and of course centralised content storing. WHS allowed me to consolidate all of our Vista Media Center content; Video, Music, Recorded TV (beware that one!), entire family life photo library, you know the usual unimportant treacle of life type stuff that you can never replace without the aid of time travel…
Anyway, trying not too ramble (see title, you were warned! ;-)…
When the VM host was a server core deployment I was managing it without too much fuss (okay quite a bit initially, but nothing some great posts by John Howard couldn’t fix, see his masters works at http://blogs.technet.com/jhoward), from a WS2008 laptop… I then rebuilt the server with Hyper-V Server (same name, same IP, ran the usual open her up for remote management scripts) but all I could get was… ‘You do not have permission….’ even though same network setup, same creds, same name.. (different SID & GUID’s of course..).
Oh and ended up writing a pagefile to the ‘offline’ passthrough disks, you know the ones with the unimportant data on….
I struggled with this on and off for a couple of weeks causing great annoyance to my nearly 6 year old, and my now nearly ex-partner whilst quietly sh..ting myself that I just might have lost all of our content inc. entire family life album, if so hopefully death (mine) would be swift…
Only today in another couple of hours of panic and desperation, did I realise that whilst I said ‘same creds’ what I meant was is that during the time of rebuilding my VM host from a server core to a hyper-v server deployment I decided it was time to strengthen the Administrator account password from one I’ve used for some time (we never worried too much about the Administrator as until WS2008 we have always disabled the Administrator account, but now not so simple for WS2008 🙁 but that’s another post! ;-). Of course, I also changed the password of the WS2008 laptop connecting to the Hyper-V server (both workgroup).
I knew the laptop could connect as configured, as it was working with the previous server core deployment. Even before using John Howard’s most excellent HVremote tool available at http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/HVRemote I was pretty confident I’d opened everything up as needed on the Hyper-V server (I’d written up and blogged the server core commands inc. Hyper-V back in March/April when involved in the UK Hyper-V RDP – http://reubenjcook.wordpress.com/2008/04/21/windows-server-2008-server-core-setup-scripts-common-commands/).
This morning after much banging of the keyboard, and my head! (we celebrated hard after passing the SCOM & SCCM exams this week :-)), it came to me in a semi-hungover blur… try the old password Luke… I changed both sides and instantly it worked!
I then almost cried with relief as getting this working meant I could start reinstating the virtualised home server with dual passthrough disks containing all of our content, or not and quickly pack my bags and follow my good friend and associate Ashley back to Qatar (he fly back this morning after the SCOM & SCCM training).
Thankfuly, my bacon was saved, and our Indiana Jones obsessed son has had back-to-back Indy all afternoon (wonder why this post is so long?… ;-))
btw, I’ve since tested by changing the password again, and it immediately breaks Hyper-V management, change it back and voila, straight away you’re back connected. It would appear the creds are cached for Hyper-V remote managment, will do more testing, but not tonight…
..now to work on my Hyper-V guest VM being a DHCP server issue (yep 2nd NIC for mgmt), although I think that might be another blogpost! 😉