Devices Page on MS Account, Desktop Designations for VMs

When I look at the Devices section on my MS Account it's obvious which devices are PCs and which are VMs. This is a typical VM designation is thus:

What's not obvious is a way to relate the various entries to the actual VM in Hype-V Manager. Since I have a number of VMs, some active and some long gone, I'd like to start removing the ones that are no longer active from my devices page. Does anyone know how I can relate the designations such as Desktop-GF98LKH to the actual Virtual Machine in Hyper-V?

SoFine409 said:

Does anyone know how I can relate the designations such as Desktop-GF98LKH to the actual Virtual Machine in Hyper-V?

That Desktop-GF98LKH is the PC name of the VM. At bottom of you screenshot is link Show details. Click it, and select Info & support to get more details:



Personally, I like to rename both my physical and virtual machines already while installing Windows, during the OOBE phase. This gives the machine more descriptive name, before even the user account is created:



It is also a good idea to use Notes in Hyper-V Manager. Open VM Settings, select Name on left pane, add notes to clearly show which VM this is.

About using Hyper-V Notes, here's an old post of mine:

Kari said:

I usually do not make any notes for discardable (not activated) virtual machines but for those activated which I repeatedly export and import I note OS build, product key used, Microsoft account linked to digital license, name of disk (if not same as VM name) or disks and GUID.

The info pane in Hyper-V Manager can't be resized and can only show four lines of note text:



Full note can only be seen in VM settings:

Kari

storageman said:

Looks like you can fix it. When I first looked I had 7 Machines. Now I have 4, which include 3 REAL systems + 1 VM

Thanks storageman. I changed the names and some of them updated on the MS servers very quickly, others didn’t. Those will probably need some additional time to update. I’ll check tomorrow.
Bob

Kari said:

That Desktop-GF98LKH is the PC name of the VM. At bottom of you screenshot is link Show details. Click it, and select Info & support to get more details:



Personally, I like to rename both my physical and virtual machines already while installing Windows, during the OOBE phase. This gives the machine more descriptive name, before even the user account is created:



It is also a good idea to use Notes in Hyper-V Manager. Open VM Settings, select Name on left pane, add notes to clearly show which VM this is.

About using Hyper-V Notes, here's an old post of mine:




Kari

Thank you Kari, Great tips about naming a PC at start was well as using notes for the VM. Since I’m just getting started with VMs, I’ll add these to my list of best practices. Really loving VMs; learning a lot.
Regards, Bob