Fix the “Can’t create highly Available VM” error in VMM

I was doing some lab testing with Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) for my Hyper-V environment the other day when I ran across this issue.  It was happening because I was attempting to save my disk image to a CSV location and I couldn’t figure out why it was blowing up.

It turns out that the answer is really simple actually but is annoying to fix.  So here is what the error looks like in VMM.  “Cannot create or update a non highly available virtual machine because the path cluster storage volume is a clustered resource error”.  Surprisingly Google didn’t turn up much for how to fix this so I thought I would make a note of it in case others happen to run across this.

VMM error

The fix is simple enough, I just wish VMM was smart enough to know when you select a CSV to use for storage.  When you go through the VM creation process and you get to the hardware selection tab, choose the “Make this virtual machine highly available” check box.

VM high availability

If you happen to be building a lot of identical (or near identical) VM’s I reccomend checking out Profiles through VMM, in this case a specific hardware profile for desktop VM’s.  Creating profiles simplifies the build and creation process and you don’t need to worry about picking all the right defaults without having your VM creation blow up.

Josh Reichardt

Josh is the creator of this blog, a system administrator and a contributor to other technology communities such as /r/sysadmin and Ops School. You can also find him on Twitter and Facebook.