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Monday 8 November 2010

Manage domain member Hyper-V servers from a workgroup PC

A scenario that often arises when installing Hyper-V hosts (running Hyper-V server or server core) for a customer without any existing server 2008/R2 servers in their environment is the need to run the Hyper-V management console from somewhere (anywhere really) while you set the servers up...

There are some fairly extensive blog articles about this, but I have boiled the essentials down to a single, pithy screenshot as usual, also worth noting that this process assumes that you have enabled the remote management options (1, 2 and 3) using sconfig previously, and accepted the kind offer of a reboot afterwards:






Start your dcomcnfg console, browse to ‘My Computer’, click ‘Edit Limits’, and finally permit remote access for anonymous users.  To finish off you need half-an-hour at gas mark four, and some domain credentials added to your machine store for accessing the servers, (this can be done either using the cmdkey utility as shown here, or ‘Credential Manager’ in control panel if you must use a GUI, the account added must have local admin rights on the Hyper-V host) and you are good to go.  It might be worth noting here that there is an (unsupported but otherwise perfectly formed) utility called HVremote which has been released which can do all this for you, it’s just that personally I like to roll my own for stuff like this.  Also worth adding as a ‘Disclaimer’: anonymous remote access to your COM objects is a ‘Very Bad Thing’TM and this should only be used as a temporary stopgap, un-set this when you are done.  Stay safe everyone.


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