Hyper-V between Windows 10 & Windows 8.1 in a workgroup

My laptop’s running Windows 10, desktop’s running Windows 8.1. Since both have client Hyper-V I thought it would be cool to install Hyper-V manager on the laptop and use it to manage Hyper-V running on the desktop. Did that and came across the following error –

Hyper-V error

DOGBERT is the Windows 8.1 desktop. The error is from my Windows 10 laptop.

First I followed the steps in this blog post. Actually, I didn’t have to do much as the account I was using on the desktop was already in the local Administrators group and so I didn’t have to do anything in terms of COM (step 3) & WMI (step 4) permissions. But I did enable the firewall rules for the Windows Management Instruction (WMI) group (step 2).

Additionally, I noticed that the Windows Remote Management (WS-Man) service was not running on the desktop so I enabled that. For this I used the winrm command.

 

Then I had to enable the Windows Remote Management (WS-Man) service on the laptop and add the desktop as a trusted host. Remember the error message above? It said that either I must use HTTPS or add the remote computer to the TrustedHosts list. I add that thus (from my laptop):

Probably a good idea to see what your existing trusted hosts are before you run this command (so you can append to the list instead of removing existing entries). You can do that thus:

After this Hyper-V manager from the laptop was able to connect to the desktop, but in the Virtual Machines section I had the following error:

Access denied. Unable to establish communication between ‘Hyper-V Server’ and ‘Hyper-V Manager’

The solution for that (thanks to this blog post) is to open “Component Services” on the laptop. Alternatively open a run window/ command prompt and type dcomcnfg.

In the windows that opens expand to Component Services > Computers > My Computer, right click and go to Properties, then the COM Security tab, and click “Edit Limits” under Access Permissions. Select the ANONYMOUS LOGIN username here and tick the box to allow Remote Access.

Component Services

That’s it! After this Hyper-V on my laptop was able to talk to the desktop.