Saturday, May 05, 2012

How to remotely manage Hyper-V on Windows 7

If you are running non-Windows OS or Windows OS without integration services installed in Hyper-V, then remotely managing those guest machines can be painful and in some cases not usable. Think non-Windows machine that you need to configure via GUI. GUI configuration of non-Windows machine over remote client connection (RDP) does not work - guest machine can't grab the mouse. To get around this limitation, you can install  Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 7 and some other minor tweaks.

Following are the steps:
  1. Of course you need to have a client OS, I will be using Windows 7 in this scenario but I hear that Windows Vista is also supported but not Windows XP and older versions. 
  2. Download and install Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 7. This download link only works for Windows 7 with Sp1 (Enterprise, Ultimate, Prof). This is no small download, around 230MB for x86 as of this writing. And yes, the install also takes quite a while.
  3. Open Control Panel then select Programs.
  4.  Under Programs and Features click on Turn Windows features on or off.
  5. In Windows Features select Remote Server Administration Tools | Role Administration Tools Feature | Hyper-V Tools then hit on OK.
  6. At this point you should have Hyper-V Manager installed but connecting to a Hyper-V Server will probably fail at this time. I believe this has to do with security and more... good thing is that someone from Microsoft created a cscript that makes this configuration a little easier. The tool is called Hyper-V Remote Management Configuration Utility. From what I can see, it is not officially supported by MSFT but hey it works. Anyway, download the tool from here.
  7. Open an elevated command prompt and navigate to where hvremote.swf was downloaded.
  8. Run the following to enable remote administration on the client OS.
  9. cscript hvremote.wsf /mmc:enable
    
  10. Since my system is workgroup environment, need to run the following. I believe this is to allow remote DCOM access to Anonymous logon.
  11. cscript hvremote.wsf /anondcom:grant
    
  12. Assuming that same user account exists between Hyper-V Server and this client OS and that the server was already configured, then you should now be able to remotely manage that Hyper-V Server.

~ts

No comments:

Fedora install screen chronicle

Fedora install screen chronicle Below are links to Fedora installation screens. It is interesting to see how it has evolved over time. Fe...