I recently found that one of my virtual machines had failed it’s initial replication off to a server located at a different site. I looked at a few of the Hyper-V-VMMS Admin Event Logs and found some of the following errors:
Event ID: 32042 – Hyper-V failed to generate initial replica for ‘040REP001’: General access denied error (0x80070005). (Virtual machine ID GUID)
Event ID: 33680 – Replication operation for virtual machine ‘ServerName’ failed.
Event ID: 32086 – Hyper-V suspended replication for virtual machine ‘ServerName’ due to a non-recoverable failure. Resume replication after correcting the failure.
Also Event ID’s 33676, 18012, 16370
I googled around and found that most resolutions revolved around fixing the “Virtual Machine” group permissions of the parent Folder or Volume by using the icacls command that looks something like this:
icacls “C:ProgramDataMicrosoftWindowsHyper-VVirtual Machines5A6F2E44-7F95-4CF8-89E5-AE8A6648C93A.xml” /grant “NT VIRTUAL MACHINE5A6F2E44-7F95-4CF8-89E5-AE8A6648C93A”:(F) /L
or this:
icacls “C:UsersPublicDocumentsHyper-VVirtual Hard DisksMountPointHere” /grant “NT VIRTUAL MACHINEVirtual Machines”:F /T
The folder that the .vhd was contained in did not have “Virtual Machine” group permissions (c:\hyper-v\exports), so I decided I should move the VM and it’s virtual hard disk to a new location that does have the correct permissions. Since this was an old export, I found the original location of the .vhd in the config file in c:\hyper-v\exports\config.xml.
Since I didn’t like the current location of the virtual machine and .vhd anyway, I decided rather than trying to fix permissions, I’d move it to a better location in a folder that would inherit the correct permissions.
To resolve the replica problem I did the following:
1. Disabled alerting on the server, then shut down the VM.
2. Disabled replication on the vm – right-click on VM in HyperV Manager -> Replication -> Remove Replication
3. Moved all Virtual Machine folders associated with MyServerName out of a folder I had created “c:\Hyper-V\Exports” including the .vhd within (folders that did not have the permissions) and cut/pasted into “C:\Users\Public\Documents\Hyper-V\Virtual hard disks\” folder that was already created. This folder inherited permissions from the parent folder including the “Virtual Machines” group.
4. On the shut-down VM, I then went into the VM’s settings and then IDE Controller 0 -> Hard Drive -> Changed Location of Virtual Hard Disk by hitting the “Browse…” button, browsed to the new .vhd location folder with the correct permissions -> OK
5. Started the Virtual Machine successfully, then re-enabled replication with the remote site Replica server and, – yes! – initial replica started normally and health is normal again. Sending initial Replica now at 3%.
6. Re-enabled alerting on the server.
Hope this helps someone else who’s replications are failing and they’re struggling with the “General Permissions Error” problems associated with snapshots and replication.