While I was playing with System Center Virtual Machine Manager Beta 1 I bumped into a problem when I tried to add a second host. Since the Virtual Server service won't even start on a VM, you can't use a VM as a host; you depend on physical equipment to test SCVMM properly.

We are working with limited resources and the only x64 host available happens to be a domain controller. The other available host is a 32-bit computer, the one we are using to run SCVMM, which we are also using as a host. While trying to add the host we got the following error:

"Error (406) Access denied while contacting the virtual machine host x64svr0x.virtua"

At first we thought it would be a domain configuration problem, it wouldn't be terribly unusual. But everything else was working just fine so we started thinking about other theories. This is very normal for beta versions of a product.

After getting some help from the nice people at Microsoft, I can tell you that if you are having this problem and you are thinking of theories too, you should know that installing either SCVMM or host agent on a DC is not supported in beta1. Keep that in mind if you are testing SCVMM.