Overview

Open vCenter (OVC) is a 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.

Install with Docker Compose Live demo

What it is

OVC is a distributed system with three first-party components:

Component	Role
ovc-frontend	React 19 / TanStack Start SSR web UI. The only REST client.
ovc-backend	FastAPI REST API + a RabbitMQ worker. Owns PostgreSQL and Valkey.
ovc-agent	A Go Windows service on every Hyper-V host. Executes the work, replies over RabbitMQ.

The backend and the agents never talk directly - every operation flows through RabbitMQ as an AgentRequest / AgentResponse pair, and every mutating operation is tracked as an asynchronous Task.

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

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

Where to go next

Docker Compose - the whole stack as containers, one compose file.
Kubernetes - the whole stack as plain manifests.
Running in dev mode - local development stack and per-host agent setup.
Architecture - how a request flows end to end, queues, task lifecycle.
Components - each repository, its stack and responsibilities.
Dependencies - PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, Valkey, OIDC, guacd.

License

Licensed under the Apache License 2.0.

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.