How to fix Service 'Azure Hybrid Instance Metadata Service' (himds) failed to start' during Azure Connected Machine Agent installation

Question

I was trying to manage my On-premises servers with Azure ARC and to do this I generated the script with Azure ARC but I have a problem during the installation with Win Server 2008 R2.

The 'Azure Hybrid Instance Metadata Service' service fails to start.

Here is the error generated in powershell:

Details: MSI (s) (88:B4) [10:14:47:402]: Product: Azure Connected Machine Agent -- Error 1920. Service 'Azure Hybrid Instance Metadata Service' (himds) failed to start. Verify that you have sufficient privileges to start system services.

MSI (s) (88:B4) [10:14:49:278]: Product: Azure Connected Machine Agent -- Installation failed.

I made sure I had the necessary prerequisites:

• Framework 5.1
• Authorization for msi installations as defined here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/azure/entra/entra-id/ad-dmn-services/azure-ad-hybrid-sync-no-privileges-install-msi

I only have this problem on my 2008 R2 SP1 servers.

Answer 1

I also encountered the same issue and make sure that all the prerequisites are installed on my 2008 server properly. I have retried with different method found on internet and none of it is work in my case.

Then i starting to do some troubleshoot and eventually found that when deploy Azure Connected Machine agent version higher or equal than 1.40 will have the same error. So, to deploy the 2008 server to azure arc, you can either download version 1.39 from

Official release notes

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-arc/servers/agent-release-notes#version-139---march-2024

Direct download link from release notes

https://download.microsoft.com/download/1/9/f/19f44dde-2c34-4676-80d7-9fa5fc44d2a8/AzureConnectedMachineAgent.msi

Then connect the 2008 server to your azure resources through azcmagent cli

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-arc/servers/azcmagent-connect

OR

Rewrite the ps1 script to download version 1.39 instead of latest version Azure Connected Machine agent

Have already opened a support ticket on this issue and reported to Microsoft, and from their reply seems that version 1.39 is the last planned version to support 2008 server.