While working on a system recently, I imported an old virtual machine – which then failed to start with this error message:
What to do? Well – thankfully the solution is already documented here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2927313/en-us
But how did this happen? And what is going on?
Well, Hyper-V allows you to grant access to the virtual machine screen for non-administrative users. You can do this using the Grant-VMConnectAccess cmdlet. However, if virtual machine screen access has been granted to a user account that no longer exists, Hyper-V does not handle it correctly.
Now, System Center Virtual Machine Manager uses Grant-VMConnectAccess automatically on all virtual machines. So the easiest way to hit this problem is to take a virtual machine that is managed by SCVMM and move it to a Hyper-V server in a different domain.
Personally, I used a slightly different method than what is documented in the KB article above. What I did was to open a PowerShell window and ran this command:
What am I doing here?
Using Grant-VMConnectAccess to add my current account causes Hyper-V to remove any invalid entries from the access table. However, I do not actually need access (I am a Hyper-V Administrator – so I always have access). Furthermore, if I just run Grant-VMConnectAccess, I will hit this problem again if I move the virtual machine to a host on a different domain. So granting access and immediately revoking it solves the problem and makes sure it does not happen again.
Cheers,
Ben