TL;DR

Create a batch file that runs vmconnect, make a shortcut to the batch file, set the shortcut to run as administrator. Viola!

How can I make a shortcut to a Hyper-V VM on my desktop for quick access?

Here is my scenario, I have a client that needs an old windows 7 system kept for historical purposes, and it is easily accessed from his computer. This, in itself, is not at all unique, I do this all the time. What is unique is that this client wants access to this legacy system on his computer, and he is a one-man-shop with only one computer. So on his little Intel NUC desktop, I enabled the Hyper-V role, used disk2vhd to p2v the old computer, and now it happily runs in the background. Now… how do I make him a shortcut?

That is EASY in Virtualbox

I would have thought it would be pretty simple, to make a shortcut to a guest VM. In fact, if I had used VirtualBox instead, that is a simple right-click and whammy there is a shortcut on the desktop. On second thought, I probably would have been better off doing this in VirtualBox rather than Hyper-V, the former being very consumer friendly, the latter being a bit less so. But, I am in it now, no time to change to VirtualBox.

You can do it from the command prompt with vmconnect

With a little research I found vmconnect.exe that will bring up a dialog where I select the host and the guest and connect to the guest instance. In fact, I think that vmconnect is being used when you double-click on the preview window in Hyper-V and connect to the guest console. I browsed the options by running vmconnect /?, here is a great cheatsheet. The command syntax is vmconnect "hostname" "guestname". Since this is running on the local machine, the hostname is localhost. Let’s say the name of the VM is Awesome Legacy VM, then my full command line is below.

vmconnect "localhost" "Awesome Legacy VM"

This command above opens up the same remote desktop console as the one you see from the Hyper-V console. That was EASY! I am well on my way, now I need a shortcut.

Shortcuts in Windows can be finicky, I’ll take a .bat file anyday

I would have thought I only had to make a shortcut to vmconnect.ext and include the arguments in the shortcut, but alas it didn’t work. This has been my experience with *.lnk files over the years, so I don’t often rely on them. Instead I created a AwesomeLegacyVM.bat file in the folder with the VM to keep it together, and it included the command above. And then I created a shortcut to that batch file, then I put it on the desktop. But it didn’t work.

YOU can’t do that, you aren’t an admin

It turns out, you have to run the vmconnect app as administrator, I didn’t realize that because I was always in an administrator command prompt. This was simple enough to fix, I just changed the shortcut to always run as administrator. The prompt you get when you run it is the same prompt when you run a command prompt as administrator, so I will have to tell the client to expect that. But this worked, I have a shortcut to a VM running in Hyper-V.

Some refinements

One thing that bugged me is that when I ran the shortcut there would be a command prompt that was sitting in the background while the connection was active. This was easy to fix, I changed the script to spawn a new process with the vmconnect program, and then I exited the script at the end. Below is the final script in all it’s minimal glory.

start vmconnect "localhost" "Awesome Legacy VM"
exit