Error 800704DD happening during a LAN migration/deployment of a VM or during a new virtual machine creation

if you are using VMM and have experienced error 0x800704DD during either a new virtual machine creation (new-vm, v2v, or p2v) or during a virtual machine migration over the network (also known as a LAN migration using BITS), then this blog post is for you.

The actual exception code caused in this case is listed below for search engines to pick up :)

The VMM Job will fail with error: HostAgentFail (2912) ... and HRESULT: 0x800704DD

Checking for the description of this error using winrm yields:

>>winrm helpmsg 0x800704DD

The operation being requested was not performed because the user has not logged

on to the network. The specified service does not exist.

 

There is only one possible cause for this error.

  1. The VMMAgent windows service is running using an account that is not LocalSystem. If this is the case, please make the vmmagent service run as localsystem on both the VMM Server computer and on all the Host and Library server computers. Running the vmmagent with an account other than localsystem is not supported by the VMM product group.