Error: Virtual Machine Advanced Policies Tab Unavailable on Windows 8

If you try to get to the Advanced Policies tab in Failover Cluster Manager on Windows 8, you will receive the following error: “There are additional property pages for this resource, but an error occurred while creating them. The COM CLSID of the DLL that provides the additional pages is {B0CA44F2-1FFC-4DBD1-8930-F4480301981B}. The specific error is: Class not registered}.

Failover Cluster Manager Advanced Policies COM Error

The exact steps to get this message are in on this blog post on the 2012 section of Method 1, but on Windows 8 with Remote Server Administration Tools installed instead.

I’m guessing that this error occurs because the management tool for Hyper-V is built into Windows 8 but Failover Cluster Manager isn’t; it comes with Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 8 instead. This particular tab requires elements from both tools to work together.

Solution

Be aware that the presented solution involves copying system components from one Microsoft operating system to another, so it’s certainly not supported. The official solution will no doubt be to only run Failover Cluster Manager from an instance of Windows Server 2012 if you need to access this tab. Hopefully there will be a service pack for RSAT for Windows 8 that permanently addresses this.

For now:

1. Access C:WindowsSystem32 on a Windows Server 2012 computer. Copy the file VMCLUSEX.DLL.
2. Place the copied file on your Windows 8 computer in WindowsSystem32.
3. On the Windows 8 computer, access an elevated command prompt and type the following:
   CD /D %WINDIR%SYSTEM32
   REGSVR32 VMCLUSEX.DLL
4. If Failover Cluster Manager was open, you’ll need to reopen it.