A couple of days ago, I was working with a colleague to build a Windows 7 proof of concept lab with a number of servers running Hyper-V and some virtualised server instances to provide the supporting infrastructure. The physical servers running are a mixture of Windows Server 2008 (full installation) and Hyper-V Server (the free of charge version of Hyper-V) but, after installing the Hyper-V role on one of the full Windows Server 2008 machines, we were still unable to manage the remote (Hyper-V Server) host – even after following John Howard’s 5-part series of blog posts to enable remote management.

Whenever I tried to connect to the Hyper-V server (or indeed the local instance of Hyper-V), Hyper-V Manager complained that:

The ‘MSVM_VirtualSystemManagementService’ object was not found

It turned out that the problem was related to not having the RTM version of Hyper-V installed on the server (a schoolboy error!) – Windows Server 2008 shipped with a beta of Hyper-V. After installing the update described in Microsoft knowledge base article 950050 (downloading Windows Server 2008 service pack 2 to bring the server completely up-to-date was a slow process over a poor Internet connection) the server was able to manage both local and remote Hyper-V resources.