Hyper-V Inventory Dashboard

A portable, single-exe Windows tool that inventories Hyper-V hosts over WinRM and displays results in a modern local web dashboard. No installer, no persistent storage — all data lives in RAM and is wiped on exit.

Building

Prerequisites

• .NET 8 SDK (winget install Microsoft.DotNet.SDK.8)

Build (development run)

cd hyper-inventory
dotnet run

Build single-file exe (release)

dotnet publish -c Release -r win-x64 --self-contained true -p:PublishSingleFile=true -o ./dist

Output: dist\hyper-inventory.exe (~80 MB, no dependencies)

Running

hyper-inventory.exe [--mock]

• Binds to 127.0.0.1 on a random free port
• Opens the system default browser automatically
• Shows the URL and session token in the console

Mock mode

hyper-inventory.exe --mock

Loads 5 simulated hosts (varied states, some unreachable, one with auth failure). No real WinRM calls.

Console keys

Key	Action
Q	Purge all data and quit
R	Re-open browser to current session

Target host requirements (Hyper-V servers)

Enable WinRM on each target host

Run as Administrator on each Hyper-V host:

Enable-PSRemoting -Force

For non-domain-joined client machines

The client running hyper-inventory.exe must trust the target host. Run once per target host (or use * for all):

# On the CLIENT machine running hyper-inventory.exe
Set-Item WSMan:\localhost\Client\TrustedHosts -Value "hv-prod-01,hv-prod-02,192.168.1.10" -Force

# Or to trust all hosts (less secure):
Set-Item WSMan:\localhost\Client\TrustedHosts -Value "*" -Force

Check current TrustedHosts:

Get-Item WSMan:\localhost\Client\TrustedHosts

WinRM authentication

Uses Negotiate (Kerberos on domain-joined machines, NTLM fallback for workgroup/non-domain). No Basic auth or CredSSP required.

Firewall

WinRM HTTP uses TCP 5985 (default). Ensure this port is open between the client machine and all target Hyper-V hosts.

Troubleshooting

Error	Cause	Fix
ICMP ✗, WinRM ✗	Host unreachable	Check firewall, IP address
ICMP ✓, WinRM ✗	WinRM not enabled / wrong port	Run Enable-PSRemoting -Force on target
WinRM ✓, Auth ✗	Wrong credentials or not in TrustedHosts	Verify creds; add to TrustedHosts if non-domain
Auth ✓, Scan error	Hyper-V module not found	Target host is not a Hyper-V server
"Access denied"	Credentials not in local admins on target	Add account to Hyper-V Administrators group

Test WinRM manually

Test-WSMan -ComputerName hv-prod-01 -Authentication Negotiate -Credential (Get-Credential)

Security notes

• Binds to 127.0.0.1 only — never exposed to the network
• All API requests require a per-session token (regenerated each launch)
• Credentials held as byte arrays, zeroed on dispose / session end
• No scan data ever written to disk; only errors.log (no PII/host data)
• All HTTP responses set Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache