Hyper-V tip: finding the IP address of a virtual machine directly from Hyper-V Manager

If you are using Hyper-V to host your virtual machines, especially for fast-paced testing and development, you might find setting up and tearing down virtual machines quite often. In these situations, I find that using DHCP for IP address management is the best option. However, the downside of this is that once you launch a new virtual machine and attempt to connect to it using Remote Desktop, you don't know the computer's name nor its IP address.

Of course, you could use Hyper-V's own connect feature to see the virtual machine and then use for instance the "hostname" and "ipconfig" commands to get the details you need. However, there's an easier way, which is easy to overlook: you can see the virtual machine's IP address directly from the Hyper-V Manager.

To see the IP address of a virtual machine, first select it. Then at the bottom of the Manager window, see Summary tab. Next to it on the right is a tab named Networking. Click this tab, and you see the IP address. Of course, the virtual machine must be running for this to work.

Hope this helps!