As you might know, Microsoft's free Hyper-V 2012 R2 Server can be managed several ways remotely. From Windows based systems through WMI. You can use SCVMM, another Windows 2012 R2 Server or Windows 8.1 with RSAT installed. If you want to mange the free version of Hyper-V 2012 R2 from MAC or Linux, or even from Windows XP or Windows 7 system just read on because Veeam has just released an interesting utility called RDP Appliance for Hyper-V Server.
Veeam has released this new utility, which is basically a Linux VM which acts as a proxy providing RDP access to the VMs running on Hyper-V 2012 R2 host. The tool is licensed as an Open Source and available through GitHub. Veeam has an Install/config guide (check Veeam's post here). The deployment of the VM is a bit “tricky” if I can say that as Veeam provides the VM in VBK format, which is basically a Veeam Backup file.
You have to install and configure Veeam Backup Free Edition to actually restore the VM onto the Hyper-V server. But this is not a problem as many people (including me) usually use Veeam Free edition installed on a laptop or desktop computer anyway. The free edition of Veeam is very handy tool which allows full backups or running VMs for archiving or transporting VMs to remote locations etc. Also great for archiving of VMs as the VMs are compressed and deduped.
Quote from Veeam's blog:
The solution is easy to use and is very handy for your home lab environment. You can connect to any of your Virtual Machines regardless of their state as long as you are working on a device that has a standard RDP connection.
Links:
Download the documentation and the solution now!
What Other options there are for managing Free Hyper-V 2012 R2?
Well, there isn't that many. Microsoft do provides RSAT but you need Widnows 8.1 which not everybody has and wish to have… Then there is 5nine Manager for Hyper-V free which allows creating VMs (even 2nd gen Hyper-V VMs) and has also built-in console which is the main inconvenient of free Hyper-V (core) based server.
Also I've already blogged about managing core version of Windows servers without any paid software and giving you some tips on the core version too. Check the full post here – Windows Server 2012 Core or GUI – My Top 5 Tips. You can find the utilities for managing Windows server core in that post. Those tools are also applicable to the Free Hyper-V 2012 R2 management.
Still, I found it a bit disappointing that that there aren't any built-in tools in Hyper-V as for very small clients willing to go the Hyper-V way, they still needs to manage a couple of VMs and W 8.1 isn't their priority either….
VMware on the other hand has their built-in tool for managing VMs – vSphere client. The software client, which now with the latest Free version of ESXi 5.5 is getting old too as you can't manage the latest version of virtual hardware VMs with vSphere (legacy Windows) client, but must use only the vSphere Web client found in the paid version (starting with vSphere Essentials). It's still an investment too…
