14 DAY TRIAL // IT professionals that have felt the need for a Task Manager capable of streamlining the management of Microsoft Hyper-V R2 Virtual Machines should give MoonSols HyperTaskMgr 1.0 a try. Matthieu Suiche, director and founder of MoonSols (which is a member of the Microsoft Bizspark start-up program), explains that HyperTaskMgr comes to fill a gap in the management of VM assets running under the software giant’s hypervisor.
The Redmond company is not providing any APIs (application programing interfaces) designed to retrieve information from the guest operating system running inside Hyper-V VMs.
“The only information that can be retrieved is hardware information provided by the Hypervisor itself such as RAM usage, processor usage either from the Hyper-V manager or from the WMI interfaces,” Suiche explains.
But what if IT pros want to easily access more data about the guest platforms in their Hyper-V R2 virtual machines? This is where MoonSols HyperTaskMgr comes in.
Suiche notes that HyperTaskMgr has been designed to access “the physical memory of each virtual machine and then parse the physical memory (using its own engine which composed of 30K+ line of C code), to be able to extract the list of process runned, DLLs loaded etc. Since there are no APIs to retrieve such information all those APIs are written from scratch to have a small TaskManager that can be used on virtual machines from the host.”
The beauty of MoonSols HyperTaskMgr is that it only requires deployment on the host operating system, not inside Hyper-V R2 virtualized platform, since what it does is read physical memory right from the host.
Here are the features of MoonSols HyperTaskMgr 1.0 highlighted by Suiche:
“• Display every processes running in each windows virtual machine, as well as each attached dll of any process.
• Kill any Process
• Provide SYSTEM privilege on the fly of any process
• Unlock the virtual machine if you don’t remember you password
• You can also mitigate exploitation of processes against kernel exploits using the “Protect against null page attack” feature.”
MoonSols HyperTaskMgr 1.0 is available for download here.
