Powerbits #8 – Opening a Hyper-V Console From PowerShell

I am right now Windows Server 8 and PowerShell 3 Beta obsessed.  I want to blog – I want to blog – I want to blog, but I’m trying to hold back a lot of it until we see how everything shakes out.  I’m running Serer 8 beta on my new Asus ultrabook.  Because of this, I’m also running a ton of Hyper-V VMs on my fancy type-1 hypervisor in order to play with the new features in PowerShell 3 such as PowerShell Web Access and disconnected PSSessions.  I love the autoload of the Hyper-V module when I do something like Get-VM, but I was really disappointed that there was no cmdlet to open up a console session for one of my VMs.  I mean, I have no interest in loading up a GUI for Hyper-V to do this.  A bit of quick research led me to vmconnect.exe.

So, without further ado, here’s a quick wrapper that will let you open up Hyper-V console sessions directly from PowerShell.  This is now permanently in my profile:

function Connect-VM {
	param(
		[Parameter(Mandatory=$true,Position=0,ValueFromPipeline=$true)]
		[String[]]$ComputerName
	)
	PROCESS {
		foreach ($name in $computername) {
			vmconnect localhost $name
		}
	}
}

Now, you can either do something like

Connect-VM server2

or

'server2','server3'|connect-vm

Finally, if you are running PowerShell 3.0, you can do the following:

(get-vm).name |Connect-VM

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