Web Access

Normally web access is accessible via: https://<fqdn>:8333/ui/
<fqdn> stands for fully qualified domain name is the same as your machine name.
This will give you access to the administration web interface.

There are several ways in which you can connect to your Virtual Machines.
The following lists the currently known ways of doing so:

1. Via the Virtual Infrastructure Client
2. Via a browser such as Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox 3
3. Via the browser plugin directly
4. Via VMware Player

Please note that Internet explorer 6 has been reported not to work with Web Access, if your findings are different then please sent me a pm about this.

Virtual Infrastructure Client

You can find the viclient here

This is a windows application that you can use for managing your VMware server (and ESX/ESXi) hosts.
Depending on your host OS this is installed in the following locations:

Windows hosts:
\Program Files\VMware\VMware Server\hostd\docroot\client\VMware-viclient.exe

Linux hosts:
/usr/lib/vmware/hostd/docroot/client/VMware-viclient.exe on linux hosts.

Or get it directly from the WebUI:
https://<server>:8333/client/VMware-viclient.exe

NOTE: The VI client download has gone missing in the 2.0.1 version from VMware Server, so in order to get it you'll need to download the 2.0.0 version of VMware Server. Upgrading from 2.0.0 to 2.0.1 leaves the file in place, so that's a way to get it. For the record VMware Server 2.0.2 still doesn't include the VI Client.
If you download the 2.0.0 tar.gz file and want to directly extract it from there then it can be found in the folder:

./vmware-server-distrib/lib/hostd/docroot/client/

To connect the VI client you would enter the following for your host: https://<fqdn>:8333 or to give you an example, if your Hosts IP is 10.10.10.10 then you would type:

https://10.10.10.10:8333

The additional port is required as you are not using port 443 by default.

VI Client cli parameters

Command line parameter for single sign on

viclient -passthroughauth -s <server>:8333

Troubleshooting VI Client access

Are you using a host based firewall on the host? If so did you add an exception?
Are all of the services running?

Linux

Is a vmware service listening?

netstat -tap | grep 8333

This should output a line containing vmware-hostd

One other thing you can try is to restart the webaccess service by:

/etc/init.d/vmware-mgmt restart

which should give the following output:

</code><pre>Stopping VMware management services:
   VMware Virtual Infrastructure Web Access
   VMware Server Host Agent                                [  OK  ]
Starting VMware management services:
   VMware Server Host Agent (background)                   [  OK  ]
   VMware Virtual Infrastructure Web Access
</pre>
</pre>

Windows

Is a vmware service listening?

netstat -an | find ":8333"

This should output a line containing vmware-hostd

Check if the VMware services are running. If they are running then have a look at your eventlog.
It may contain errors, such as:

The VMware Host Agent service terminated with service-specific error 4294967295 (0xFFFFFFFF). 

There is a proxy service that takes the content on localhost from:
If the above doesn't work, then you can try this as well:

http://127.0.0.1:8308/ui

Using Web Access

This is the standard interface to administer your Virtual Machines.
In order to use it, open a browser and enter:

http://localhost:8222

or when using SSL:

https://localhost:8333

Instead of localhost, you can also use the hostname or IP number of your host.

Troubleshooting on linux

If your web access isn't working then try:

/etc/init.d/vmware-mgmt restart

and see if restarting the management interface helps

If you are getting a blank login screen or an error like "datetime proxysvc xxxxx warningSSL Handshake on client connection failed: SSL excpetion: error: xxxxx" then do try to connect via http instead of https.
There also have been reports that this problem could be resolved by rerunning the vmware-config.pl script and assigning another user as the root user.

SELinux setup

If you are using a linux distribution such as Red Hat Enterprice Linux or CentOS or Fedora and you want to use VMware Server with SELinux then be aware that you'll need an additional step in your setup.

sudo chcon -t texrel_shlib_t /usr/lib/vmware/vmacore/libvmacore.so.1.0

now VMware Server with the command:

sudo /etc/init.d/vmware restart

Sometimes you'll see that the first chcon command throws an error: "can't apply partial context to unlabeled file". This basically just means that your system hasn't been setup for use with SELinux recently and that you should relabel the file or system. As it makes most sense to make sure your system is properly labeled, I'd suggest to relabel everything using:

sudo touch /.autorelabel

then reboot your system and retry running the chcon command from above again after your system has settled.

Using the remote console directly

It is possible to open the remote console without opening a browser. The option offered by VMware Server is to create a shortcut on your desktop.

On linux it works like this: First login to web access and for the machine that you want to generate a shortcut for, click on the "Generate URL" option. Then change the option to "generate a shortcut" option and then instead of generating a normal URL, have it create an icon to your desktop instead. This will access the remote console in a different way and does not go through the browser.

For example on my linux host it created the following launcher:

home/<user>/.mozilla/firefox/<random>.default/extensions/VMwareVMRC@vmware.com/plugins/vmware-vmrc -h "<hostname>:8333" -M "16"

The values between the brackets are obfuscated by me. The option -M "16" is used to identify the virtual machine number, so that will be different for you normally. If you remove this option, it will present you with a list of all the virtual machines for the host that you are logging in to. If you remove the -h "hostname:8333" option you can enter the hostname as well, otherwise it is prefilled. The login screen mentions that you can use it to login to ESX as well.

I just verified that here and works nicely with an ESX3.5U2 server in the lab here...

Troubleshooting remote console

So your remote console doesn't work :/ Let's see if we can get that bit sorted somehow.
One possible reason for this is a missing dependency of some kind.

What happens if you run the launcher part of it in a terminal console, does it give you an error of some kind?
Usually this will return enough error information for you to find out why.
So far I've seen these 2 issues:

./vmware-vmrc
process 17001: Attempt to remove filter function 0xb532ba45 user data 0x83493b0, but no such filter has been added
D-Bus not built with -rdynamic so unable to print a backtrace

Putting the error msg into google brought up this little important piece of information:
http://linxtrix.com/2008/03/15/vmware-d-bus-not-built-with-rdynamic-so-unable-to-print-a-backtrace/

Which meant that hald was not started.
starting it fixed that error.

Another issue from someone else showed that his remote console had the wrong credentials set on all of his files.
An

ls -alh

on the plugin folder showed that little issue and he could solve it with

chown -Rf user.group VMwareVMRC@vmware.com/

fixed that for him.

Are you using DHCP? Yes then try a fixed IP instead, or if you are testing on the host itself, try using the local loopback address: 127.0.0.1 instead of the normal IP address.

Are you on a wireless network and did your connection drop? Try having a look at: http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles_tutorials/Disable-Media-Sense-TCPIP-Windows-XP.html and think about installing the Microsoft Local Loopback adapter instead.

An alternative remote console: VMplayer

VMware player appears to have remote console functionalities built in.

For example you can call vmplayer like this from the command line:

vmplayer -h 10.10.10.10 -u "root" -p "password" "[datastore1] 2k3en/2k3en.vmx"

and it will connect to the host on the IP supplied and open up the remote Virtual Machine.

With the vmplayer on linux it even includes a virtual machine selector and login dialog, so in order to connect to a virtual machine that runs on a VMware Server 2 host you could use this:

vmplayer -h 10.10.10.10:8333

and then enter user id / password, select the VM that you want to take into control.. and use it. (see screenshots below for a better idea on this)
If you are connecting from a remote machine to a VMware Server 2.x host, then you need to open the tcp ports 8333 and 902 in order to use the console.

With the windows version of vmplayer, you'll have to supply all of the parameters.
Although this post here: Re: VMplayer as remote-console ??? appears to suggest that you can get the same functionality as under linux by copying vmware-remotemks.exe from the plugin folder to the directory containing the player.

Here's some screenshots from connecting to an ESXi host, using:

vmplayer -h 10.10.10.10

The :8333 port suffix is only needed for a VMware Server host, you can connect to a ESXi host by just entering the IP/hostname