“The RPC server is unavailable” with Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter

  • Article

When I first tried to perform a physical to virtual migration with the Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter 3.0 – I immediately hit this error message:

image

After a bit of poking around, I was able to figure out the problem.  Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter use WMI, which is blocked on the Windows Firewall by default.  Once I had allowed WMI through:

image

Everything started working.

Cheers,
Ben