Hyper-V failed to enable replication for virtual machine

While trying to switch around my Hyper V replication scheme so I could take one of my servers offline for a while so I could expand its RAID 10 array and change the way I had it the array partitioned to “One Big RAID 10”. I ran into an issue where I wasn’t able to replicate to an old server I had stood up temporarily running Hyper V Server 2012r2, this was just the free hyper v server, not 2012r2 std. The error I got was “Hyper-V failed to enable replication for virtual machine ‘DC2’: The operation timed out (0x00002EE2).”After many failed attempts and lots of scratching on my rapidly balding head I found this post on the microsoft technet forum that fixed the issue for me. I was sceptical that it would work since I had already disabled the firewall, but adding these rules via powershell did the trick. Here is how I implemented the fix.

  1. log in to the offending server(s), either locally or via RDP, you could also run the commands remotely if you choose.
  2. open powershell, if you are running the free hyper-v server this can be done by just typing “powershell” at the command prompt. If you are running standard windows server or the like I’ll assume you know how to launch it from the menu or search.
  3. run the following commands: Enable-Netfirewallrule -displayname “Hyper-V Replica HTTP Listener (TCP-In)”    then this one:  Enable-Netfirewallrule -displayname “Hyper-V Replica HTTP Listener (TCP-In)”

Now try to enable replication for one of your VMs.