Recently, I found myself needing to update a Provisioning Server vDisk and in this particular case, I was using an XP VM hosted within a Hyper-V infrastructure to boot the vDisk. After configuring the desktop to boot using the vDisk in the PVS Console, I was surprised to see:

After the initial surprise, I got to looking at the screen and something looked funny. I started to think that the MAC address was different, but because I can barely remember my PIN number, I didn’t think I had the capacity to remember MAC addresses. Regardless, I checked the PVS Console and sure enough, the MAC address for my XP VM had changed!

At this point, I opened up the SCVMM Console and noticed my XP VM had been migrated to another Hyper-V host. Additionally, when checking the properties of the VM, the NIC was set to obtain a MAC address dynamically. Thus, when the VM was migrated to another Hyper-V host, its MAC address changed, and kept the PVS from communicating with the target device. I shut the VM down, and set the MAC address to Static (matching the PVS target device) as shown below:

Once the VMs MAC Address matched that specified in the PVS Console, everything worked as expected.

On a side note, I have NOT seen this same behavior by any Hyper-V based virtual desktops that have been created using the XenDesktop Setup Wizard.

More on Hyper-V MAC Addresses can be found here