As I’m mooting some hardware upgrades to my bash’n’crash Hyper-V server, I wanted to check out a few things with regards to it’s performance and general health.  I duly fired up Server Manager, but was thwarted when I tried to use Disk Management and got the message of RPC Server is unavailable.  I checked the Firewall, and the requisite rules (see below) were enabled.  I recycled the Virtual Disk Service and still had no luck.

After hunting around a while I found a Technet Forum post that covered this.  You have to enable the necessary inbound rules both on the server being managed and the managing computer.  Once I had done this, and restarted Server Manager, I could access Disk Management.

For reference, the two rules that need to be enabled are:

Remote Volume Management – Virtual Disk Service (RPC)

Remote Volume Management – Virtual Disk Service Loader (RPC)

As per the Technet post, I found that you don’t need the Remote Volume Management (RPC-EPMAP) rule enabled.  Needless to say, I only enabled both rules for the Domain firewall profile.