There are many reasons why deploying a VMRole from the windows Azure pack will fail and I think I’ve had most of them. Even using Grit I some how managed to spend months failing (I’ll save that for another post). However I came across a beauty today and I thought i’d share.

You deploy a VMRole and it fails. There are a few errors and one of them is.

Error (609)
  
Virtual Machine Manager cannot detect a heartbeat from the specified virtual machine. Either the virtual machine is not running or Virtual Machine Additions is not installed.

If you start the machine (If you can Repair/Ignore) you’ll see that its asking for a product key. The VHD your using probably works fine with your SCVMM templates, because you specify a key in the template. However editing the Gallery item definition is not as easy as updating a SCVMM template, but there is an alternative.

The PowerShell command Get-SCVirtualHardDisk has a switch “-Product Key” that will install your product key in any VMD/VMDX you point it at. Any example is below.

Get-SCVirtualHardDisk -VMMServer "vmm01.test.lab" | where { $_.id -eq “9a7c3966-1230-4687-a3d6-5c8628db92e9”} | set-scvirtualharddisk -ProductKey #####-#####–#####–#####–##### |Get-SCVirtualHardDisk