I love all things Microsoft, but SCVMM turns out to be a real pain... even in its latest version. Looks like 2012 will stay in my lab environment for more than I initially thought before I start rolling it out to clients.

What I tried to do was to move a highly available VM from an SCVMM 2012 managed Hyper-V cluster to a standalone Hyper-V server. The job failed. I repaired the VM in SCVMM but when I started it Windows came up with this message:

"The trust relationship between this computer and the primary domain failed"

Now, labs are for simulating leal-life senarios and in this instance the VM hosted an Exchange 2010 server so taking it off the domain and joining it back again was out of the question.

There's a whole bunch of fixes on the Net, like changing NIC provider order, deleting corrupt GPOs, resetting the computer account in AD, using NETDOM to reset the secure channels and many more.

I found that the simplest way was to go to System Properties, Computer Name tab, click on 'Change' and under 'Domain' just type in the NETBIOS domain name (i.e. instead of domain.local, type DOMAIN).

OK all windows, restart and voila: domain trust reinstated.

Now all that's left is to figure out why SCVMM botched up the VM move and if the issue can be replicated.