SCVMM 2012 R2 and Alternate Credentials

A little while ago I updated my home installation to run Windows Server 2012 R2.  This provided the perfect opportunity to deploy System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) in my home.  Overall this has been a great thing to do – but there have been some teething issues for me.

In my house I make heavy use of alternate credentials.  My desktop user account (Benjamin) is not an administrator on any of my servers.  I have a second account (David) that I use exclusively for server management.  When I first setup the remote management tools for SCVMM it looked like it would work perfectly for me – as it immediately asked if I wanted to specify alternate credentials:

This allowed me to connect successfully and interact with my Hyper-V servers.  However, attempting to connect to a virtual machine console would always fail with the following error message:

I suspected that the SCVMM management console was still using my “Benjamin” account for the virtual machine console access.  To test this I changed the SCVMM console shortcut to use “runas”.  To do this, I found the shortcut:

Opened its properties and changed the target from:

"C:\Program Files\Microsoft System Center 2012 R2\Virtual Machine Manager\bin\VmmAdminUI.exe"

To:

C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /c runas /savecred /user:ARMSTRONG\David "C:\Program Files\Microsoft System Center 2012 R2\Virtual Machine Manager\bin\VmmAdminUI.exe"

This time when I started it I did not specify credentials – and everything worked correctly:

Cheers,
Ben