VirtualBox

RPC Server

An interesting quirk of running Virtual Machines for this post… the background is my ‘main work PC’ is currently running Windows 7; in order to remotely manage a Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 machine I had installed Oracle VirtualBox onto my main PC and inside that had setup a Windows 8.1 VM to remotely manage the Hyper-V Server instance.

However after setting up remote management I found that I could connect to all of the remote management tools on my Hyper-V machine with the exception of Disk Management and Hyper-V Manager with the following error message generated in Hyper-V Manager.

RPC Server unavailable. Unable to establish connection between <Hyper-V Host> and <Client PC>.

After much investigation into this issue (and after following a number of dead ends relating to firewall settings, the hosts file and COM security) it transpires that the issue was related to the way that I had setup the network adapter within VirtualBox.

In particular the adapter had been set to NAT mode, now given the properties of NAT it seems plausible that some vital information might have been mangled in the process – if anyone feels like doing some Wireshark on this to discover the cause then please do!

The resolution was simple – setting the adapter to bridged mode instead which allowed the traffic to pass through the virtual adapter just fine.

If you have ever tried to boot a VirtualBox VM into PXE (Microsoft WDS/MDT based) using the default Intel PRO/1000MT Desktop adapter you may have seen the error message

FATAL: Could not read from the boot medium! System halted.

The simple solution to this problem (and to get you booting into WDS) is to install the VirtualBox extension pack which can be found on the same download page as the VirtualBox installer (link).

This extension pack includes the required files for boot to continue normaly, a few screen shots are shown below detailing what you need to do.