Setting Up Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 in Workgroup

I’ve been able to set up a Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 in a spare server box at work. I wanted to set up remote management from my Windows 7, also a workgroup laptop, but it was not a trivial task.

First, I had to set up the Hyper-V box correctly, as per Microsoft instructions in the readme file. Then I installed the Windows 7 Hyper-V Management extensions on my laptop. I enabled them in Windows Features but I kept getting this error message:

You do not have the required permission to complete this task. Contact the administrator of the authorization policy for the computer ‘COMPUTERNAME’

I found out the excellent posts by John Howard that explained the process of setting up the server and the client machine correctly.

I had to disable the password complexity requirements on Hyper-V server, as my current password in Windows 7 is not complex enough. It’s described in Medo64’s blog.

After all the setup, I still got this error message in Hyper-V Management snap-in:

Cannot connect to the RPC service, make sure your RPC service is running

The culprit was the hosts file, as the DNS service didn’t resolve correctly the hyper-v server name. I had to add a manual entry in HOSTS file and then it worked: