Writing Your Own VMConnect App/Web Interface For VM Console Access To Hyper-V VM’s

Ever since Hyper-V’s first beta I’ve had people ask about the ability to write there own custom interface to replace VMConnect.  Some wanted a windows application other’s wanted to write a web application.  The goal’s varied from wanting to just show the console session for monitoring to integrating it VM’s into existing physical machine applications to wanting to develop custom hosting applications allowing users to do some things like start/stop and interact but nothing more.  When we started developing Hyper-V we decided that instead of writing our own transport for sending over screen images, key strokes, mouse etc… that we would instead leverage the existing remote desktop protocol (RDP, Terminal Services, TS, what ever you want to call it).

That means that accomplishing developing such a applications is actually pretty straight forward if you know the magic incantation.  The good news is that the Dynamic Datacenter Tool Kit team has posted a full C# sample for just this.  If you combine this code with some of the other code posted either here on my blog or on MSDN you can pretty easily write your very own Hyper-V UI.

The Dynamic Data Center Toolkit for Hosters is located at https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/ddc and the Hyper-V RDP Active X control sample is a sub project off of that page.

Taylor Brown
Hyper-V Enterprise Deployment Team
taylorb@microsoft.com
https://blogs.msdn.com/taylorb