When you have multiple (or even one) virtual machines hosted on a server, you should take steps to ensure recovery in the event your host server reboots or crashes resulting in the virtual server services restarting.

First, create a regular user account that you will use to start the servers. This account should have limited privileges and will need to be assigned to rights. At the time of this writing, the directions provided by Microsoft do cover quite all of the steps and permissions required. I have summarized the entire process below.

This Technet page does a good job of summarizing the actual folder permissions required. They are:

• Grant Read/Write/Execute to the following files

1. Virtual Network Configuration (.vnc) files.
2. Virtual Machine Configuration (.vmc) files.
3. Virtual Hard Drive (.vhd) files.

• Grant Log on Locally right

That second step is not mentioned in most places, but is critical.

Next, determine your boot order. Each machine can have a delay set, and this is helpful to prevent all of your system resources being swamped at once, or to ensure dependent servers start in the correct order. For example, you don't want your SharePoint front end to load before the server hosting your SQL backend starts.

Finally, set the recovery behavior. You can set the machine to always start, or only start if it was started at the time of the host system crash. Secondly, you can set whether to gracefully shut down the OS or save the state of the server. This way if an intended maintenance process gracefully shuts down the host OS, the guest OS will attempt to stop gracefully as well causing less risk of data loss.