Hyper-V Manager on Vista – final thoughts

Last time, I was working to get the Hyper-V Manager on Vista SP1 talking to a Server 2008 Hyper-V system. A couple of clarifications are in order - and a recommendation on a good document to have on hand when you're setting this up.

First point is that you do not need to run through the Authorization Manager drill, as I described last time, if the account you're using has administrative rights on both machines. The second point is that it's not enough to activate the WMI firewall rules on both systems - you also have to enable DCOM access for the remote user, and grant WMI permissions to that user. That, it turns out, is a fairly involved process (it took me about 15 minutes).

You'll use the Computer Management console's Local Users and Groups feature to add the remote user to the group named Distributed COM Users. Then choose the properties for the WMI Control node in Services and Applications, and add the remote user to the permissions list for the ROOT\CIMV2 and ROOT\virtualization namespaces. The details are in a handy document named "Hyper-V Planning and Deployment Guide" published by Microsoft in July 2008. Jump through these hoops and you'll find that the Hyper-V Manager on a Vista books works fine.