So maybe you’ve been bold like I have and installed Windows 8.1. And maybe you want to use the new Hyper-V portion of 8.1 and setup a VM or two to play with. In the process, you discover this great feature called Hyper-V Virtual Machine Connection, which is essentially like a RDP connection for Hyper-V virtual machines. In other words, using this connection, you can now treat a VM like a full screen RDP session!

This feature was new to me and I was super excited to see it. However, when I launched it, I got the following message.

[callout] You do not have the required permission to complete this task. Contact the administrator of the authorization policy for the computer ‘MYCOMPUTERNAME’.[/callout]

If you try and select the Virtual Machine dropdown box, it says “<Error loading virtual machines>”.

YouDoNotHaveTheRequiredPermission

 

It seems a bit odd to me that I can’t access VM’s located on my local machine, especially when I’m a local administrator. After looking around a bit, I found that there is a local Hyper-V Administrators group that by default is empty. Add yourself to the group by doing the following:

  1. Access the Computer Management interface. In Windows 7 and Windows 8, this can be found by simply searching for Computer Management.
  2. Expand the Local Users and Groups section and click on Groups
  3. Double click on the Hyper-V Administrators group
  4. In the Dialogue box, click Add… and then enter your user name in the box and hit OK. Hit OK again and close out of Computer Management
  5. One more caveat. In my experience, I needed to log out and log back into Windows for the changes to work.

Computer Management

After completing these steps, I was able to use the Hyper-V Virtual Machine Connection tool to connect to my local Hyper-V VMs with no problems whatsoever. Hope that helps, and as always, comment to let me know your thoughts. Thanks!