In the last couple of weeks I’ve been installing and configuring a System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 R2 (VMM) environment.

At first all management was done from the VMM management server and console access to VMs from VMM was working fine. Later on the VMM console (and appropriate rollup) were installed on the laptop directly. Then when he opened the VMM console as a regular user and entered the administrator credentials on the VMM console. All was fine until he tried to access the console of VMs from within VMM, because then for most (not all VMs) he received the following error:

Virtual Machine Manager lost the connection to the virtual machine for one of the following reasons.

Another connection was established to the console of this machine
The virtual machine has been shut down or put into the saved state
The user credentials provided do not have the necessary privilege to connect

(0x0003, 0x0000)

Other connections were not established to the console of this machine and the virtual machine had also not been shut down or put into the saved state. The user credentials provided when connecting to VMM were of an administrator account with VMM admin permissions.

Since the administrator logs on to his laptop using a non-admin account, we first tried to run the VMM console “As Administrator” but this didn’t resolve the issue.

Then I googled the error and found this knowledge base article : VMM 2012 Self-Service users cannot open a console session to a virtual machine . The description didn’t really match our symptoms since the account specified to connect to VMM was an administrator account instead of a self-service user and it was possible to open a VM console session when the VMM console was opened from the VMM Management Server. To rule it out, we tested the proposed resolution and verified using Get-VMConnectAccess that everything was configured correctly.

The solution was to SHIFT+Rightclick on the VMM console shortcut and then choose “Run as different user” and enter the credentials of the administrator account. After that everything worked fine.