Important notes on VMM 2008

• SCVMM must be installed on a system in the domain. This isn’t a big deal in most environments, but if you aren’t using a domain (such as I wasn’t in my test environment).
• SCVMM must be installed on Windows Server 2008 x64.
• Once your install SCVMM, only the account which installs SCVMM has permissions to log into the application! Adding users to the SCVMM local groups do not help, new users have to be created in the administration screen of the SCVMM console.
• When adding hosts, the SCVMM server needs to be able to do name resolution to the hosts being added. Hosts will not add if they cannot be contacted via DNS. This is extremely logical of course, but it caused me issues in one installation so I thought it was good to remember to test name resolution if a host isn’t deploying correctly.
• If the installer continually states machine must be rebooted before installation can continue clearing the value at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\PendingFileRenameOperations will resolve the issue.
• If problems occur adding host systems to the VMM console using the windows domain joined host option such as a “Network path not found” error use the windows perimeter network host option by manually installing the agent on the host server and copying the SecurityFile.txt file from C:\Program Files\Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 on the host system to a location on the SCVMM server and referencing it during the addition process.
• If SQL 2005 is installed on the same machine as SCVMM it should be configured to have the services run as the same account that is performing the installation of SCVMM. Also, computer cannot be renamed after installation of SQL without needing to completely remove and reinstall SQL and SCVMM.

Good links on this:

• http://cameronfuller.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!A231E4EB0417CB76!1455.entry - source of this post
• http://blogs.technet.com/chengw/archive/2008/04/29/installing-scvmm-2008-beta.aspx - Installing the Beta
• http://blogs.technet.com/m2/archive/2008/04/18/dealing-with-vmm-error-2917-the-network-path-was-not-found.aspx - Error during install (be sure to log into the domain to install SCVMM, not the local system)
• http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=3381559&SiteID=17 – Forest and domain level