Open vCenter

Overview

Open vCenter (OVC) is a modern web console for managing VMs. It currently supports Microsoft Hyper-V clusters, hosts and virtual machines: browse your inventory, run VM lifecycle and power actions, edit hardware, manage templates and ISOs, and open a VM console straight from the browser.

Tested on Windows 11, Windows Server 2022 and Windows Server 2025; should also work on 2019/2016.

Status	Feature
✅ Available	Creating and managing BIOS/UEFI VMs
✅ Available	Disk and virtual NIC management
✅ Available	Snapshots
✅ Available	Mounting / unmounting ISOs
✅ Available	Autostart order
✅ Available	Batch start / stop
✅ Available	Basic CPU / memory / network metrics for VMs and hosts
✅ Available	Remote HTML5 console to Windows/Linux VMs
🗓 Planned	vTPM support
🗓 Planned	vGPU management
🗓 Planned	Cluster host affinity / anti-affinity
🗓 Planned	Automatic storage workload distribution (DRS-like)
🗓 Planned	Non-Hyper-V hosts/agents

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Screenshots

See docs/screenshots/ for more.

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How it works

OVC is a distributed system: a web frontend, a backend (REST API + worker), and a lightweight agent running on every Hyper-V host. The frontend is the only REST client; the backend never talks to a host directly - every operation is published to RabbitMQ as a Task and picked up by that host's agent, which runs the work and reports back asynchronously.

Browser ──REST──▶ ovc-frontend ──REST /api/*──▶ ovc-backend ──RabbitMQ──▶ ovc-agent (per host)
                                                     │
                                            PostgreSQL + Valkey

See Architecture for the full request lifecycle, queues and task states.

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Components

Each component lives in its own repository:

Component	Role	Repository
ovc-frontend	React 19 / TanStack Start SSR web UI.	https://github.com/openvcenter/Open-vCenter-Frontend
ovc-backend	FastAPI REST API + a RabbitMQ worker. Owns PostgreSQL and Valkey.	https://github.com/openvcenter/Open-vCenter-Backend
ovc-agent-hyperv	Go Windows service on every Hyper-V host. Executes the work, replies over RabbitMQ.	https://github.com/openvcenter/Open-vCenter-Agent-HyperV

See Components for each repository's stack and responsibilities in detail.

The backing services (PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, Valkey, an OIDC provider, and guacd for the browser consoles - ovc-frontend talks to it directly) are ordinary containers you run yourself - see Dependencies.

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Running it

• Running in dev mode - local development stack and per-host agent setup.
• Docker Compose - the whole stack as containers, one compose file, using the published GHCR images.
• Kubernetes - the whole stack as plain manifests.

In both, the OIDC provider (Keycloak or any other) is optional.

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License

Licensed under the Apache License 2.0 - see LICENSE.

Disclaimer

Open vCenter is an independent, community-driven open source project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by or supported by Microsoft, VMware, Broadcom or any other vendor whose products it works with or is compared to.

Microsoft, Windows, Windows Server and Hyper-V are trademarks of the Microsoft group of companies. VMware, ESXi, vSphere, vCenter and vMotion are trademarks of Broadcom Inc. and/or its subsidiaries. All other trademarks belong to their respective owners.

The "vCenter" in the project's name refers to the general idea of a virtualization management center, not to VMware's product.

The software is provided "as is", without warranty of any kind - see LICENSE. Use it at your own risk, and try it on machines you can afford to lose before trusting it with the ones you cannot.