how to use vmware remote console with vi sdk

[visual2me]

hi all,

recently, i plan to embed the vmware remote console in my own pages. any one knows how to implement this function?

[ssurana]

Hi,

I can suggest you one possible way of doing so. You can use the Web Access to your ESX or the VC to browse till the VM of your choice. Then using the Web Access there is a option present "Generate Remote Console URL". Use this feature to generate the URL for accessing that remote console. In the options present there you can restrict the access only to the Console by checking the "Limit view to the remote console" check box.

With this URL generated then you can use it in your own application either inside a frame/iframe to display the console of the VM.

Do let us know how it went for you.

Hope the above information helps.

~ Sidharth

[visual2me]

it really works that i can access the web console with the generated url. but one problem is that how to get this generated url for each vm in my web application? this url is consistent for each vm?

however, thank you very much for this important tip, and appreciate your great help all the while:)

[ssurana]

Hi,

You would have to generate url for each machine individually to use them.

~ Sidharth

[jrackliffe]

As a note this was discussed earlier this year on the forum

http://communities.vmware.com/message/891004

You should be able to generate the URL by following a specific text format and than doing a conversion to base64.

[visual2me]

yeah, it's right. Now we can parse and generate the url by base64 encoder/decoder. But it seems there's still another problem when embeding this url in a frame -- how to keep client users from authentication of server? since i don't want to expose the login info to others.

[jrackliffe]

Ahh gotcha.

Yeah I think the VMware standard pages require a forms authentication toget the credentials to connect to the Console. I don't believe you can pass those to the pages in any other method like NTLM passthrough etc.

What you may be able to do is grab the MKSConsole ActiveX and XPF controls and write your own console pages which you could manage acquiring the mks ticket, authorization, etc. using your own solution. There were a couple posts on this last year, but in any case it won't be as simple as having your customers do the double auth.

[visual2me]

I think the appropriate way is to grab its ActiveX and construct the page by myself; but why VMware not exposing a set of api for its remote console?

however, thank you very much for the posts.