QuickTricks: Hyper-V Remote Control

Want a quick way to remotely control a Hyper-V guest without using the Hyper-V manager? The program that is run by the Hyper-V manager to remote control is stored in the same place as the Hyper-V management console (c:\program files\Hyper-V\) and is called vmconnect.exe (Virtual Machine Connection).

The vmconnect.exe takes parameters of <ServerName> <VMName> <VMGUID> <Count>.

Example:

Vmconnect localhost All_2008_OpsMgr

To connect to the local machine to a virtual by the name of All_2008_OpsMgr.

If you go to start/run and run that (c:\program files\Hyper-V\vmconnect.exe) it will open directly to the Virtual Machine Connection. You can also take this executable and copy it to something in the path (such as c:\windows) or add the c:\program files\Hyper-V folder to the path. Then you can just do a start / run, vmconnect to access the Virtual Machine Connection (this assumes of course that Hyper-V is installed on the system you are trying to access the executable from). Running the program without passing parameters looks like this:

The full parameters list is:

Quicktrick summary: Copy c:\program files\Hyper-V\vmconnect.exe to c:\windows. To open the Virtual Machine Connector go to start/run and type vmconnect!