leedesmond’s blog

To connect to a virtual machine in Hyper-V, you can use the Virtual Machine Connection application via the Connect option under the Action pane for the VM. By default, only administrators have unrestricted access to the Hyper-V Manager console (hence all VMs defined on permitted servers).

You can fall back on the familiar Remote Desktop Connection (mstsc.msc) to reach your VMs from a distance. Windows Server 2003 already provides two built-in remote connections out-of-the-box for administrative purposes.

For Windows Server 2008 and Server Core, this feature must be explicitly enabled. On top of that, verify that your version of Remote Desktop Connection on the connecting host supports Network Level Authentication and Remote Desktop Protocol 6.1. These are required to successfully connect to default installations of Windows Server 2008 and Server Core remotely. RDC 6.0.6001 already ships with these enhancements as part of WS08 RTM.

Using RDP will minimize the need for an administrator to grant unneeded privileges for Hyper-V Manager access thereby maintaining security on the box. In addition, this helps to save approximately 10MB of RAM memory per VM connection. With multiple VMs per host machine, this can work out to be a significant number that can impact performance. You can also copy text from the guest VM to the host machine, a very convenient feature not possible with the Virtual Machine Connection application.

Technorati tags: Windows Server 2008, Windows Server Virtualization, Hyper-V

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