Connecting to Remote VMs with Hyper-V RC0

Published 27 April 8 11:23 AM | Charlie Russel

One of the changes in Hyper-V RC0 is that you can no longer use a mouse in a remote RDP session until  you have the Integration Components installed into the VM. Well, that's a royal pain if you don't happen to be sitting at the console of your server. However, there is a workaround - run the VMConnect application locally on you Vista 64 desktop (or laptop), but use it to connect to the remote session.

When you install the Hyper-V Remote Management components on your Vista box, it installs both virtmgmt.msc, the Hyper-V Manager console, and VMConnect.exe. Both are installed in %ProgramFiles%\Hyper-V, which is not on your path by default. So, I use a couple of little PowerShell aliases to get around the problem. In my $profile, I've added the following two lines:

set-alias hyperv -value "C:\Program Files\Hyper-V\virtmgmt.msc"
set-alias vm -value "C:\Program Files\Hyper-V\vmconnect.exe"

now, to connect to a VM, I simply type:

PSH> vm <hostname> <vmname>

and I'm in business.

Charlie.