SOLVED: Failover Cluster Manager – An Error Occurred While Moving Virtual Machine(s) Storage – General Access Denied 0x80070005

This was an ugly little problem for a newbie to Failover Clustering like me.  If you see the:

An Error Occurred While Moving Virtual Machine(s) Storage – General Access Denies 0x80070005

the most likely cause is that the path you have used on one volume is not IDENTICAL on the volume you are trying to move the VHDx’s to.  In my case I was using

C:\ClusterStorage\Volume1\Virtual Hard Disks

and trying to move the disks to:

C:\ClusterStorage\Volume2\Hyper-V\Virtual Hard Disks

Now you may ask yourself, why anyone would create different paths when they are setting up disk… and I wish I had a good explanation but I just don’t.

The solution to moving VHDx’s from Volume1\Virtual Hard Disks was to create a Volume2\Virtual Hard Disks folder.

I read lots of blogs about how to move virtual machine storage and about General Access Denies 0x80070005 that referenced ideas like:

1. Use FAILOVER CLUSTER MANGER on the Host that has the disks currently (and not just the FCM Console from your workstation)
2. Changing permissions
3. Creating folders that are named the same as the VM in question

but then I found this post which mentioned:

“For a clustered host, either Windows Server-based or VMware-based, the default virtual machine path is a shared volume on the cluster that VMM automatically creates when you add the cluster as a host. When you add a clustered host, you cannot specify additional default paths in the Add Host Wizard. Also, after a host cluster is added, you cannot specify additional default virtual machine paths on the Placement tab of the host properties.”

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc917914.aspx

That got me thinking about the paths so that you to whoever wrote that bit in TechNet.