Direct remote access to a VM running on vSphere environment

[d0se]

Hi,

i'm trying to get remote access to a virtual machine which is running on an ESX-Server. This is not the problem by itself, so a bit more information.

At the moment my server is an ESX 3.5 one managed by Virtual Center and Infrastructure Client which i set up for testing purposes (our old VMware Server should be replaced by a more powerful server hardware with appropriate OS). Since ESX 4 was released we will purchase a vSphere package instead of the planned ESX 3.5, what leads me to my question.

All our VMs are managed by vCenter but have to be started by our own piece of software. If the VM has come up, the user should directly connect to the VM without seeing any infrastructure like other VMs. In order to retain comfort there should be no further authentication as it would be with Infrastructure Client or mstsc, VNC...

I thought about using vmrc out of VMware Server, but i don't know if this works correctly with ESX. With this i could pass the username and password as arguments

vmware-vmrc.exe -h 10.10.10.10 -u "user" -p "pw" "[DataStoreSAN] WinXP/WinXP.vmx"

and show the user only the VM without any option to manipulate the VM or get additional options. It seems that vmrc uses vmware-remotemks.exe like Infrastructure Client does, but i can't start it and don't find any list of parameters to pass.

Does anyone know a program or a possibility how to solve this problem so that the user only gets the remote access and "nothing more". Would be great!

Thanks & regards.

[wila]

Hi,

The best solution for this is to use appropriate remote desktop software such as RDP or VNC.

Main reason for that is that it will not further bog down the service console / CPU0 with the overhead of your remote desktop.

Indeed you can also use vmware-vmrc or even vmware-player, see also: for more details, to access your remote console directly.

--

Wil

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Visit the VMware developers wiki at http://www.vi-toolkit.com

[wila]

or read this instead Remote consoles for windows and linux

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Wil

_____________________________________________________

Visit the VMware developers wiki at http://www.vi-toolkit.com

[d0se]

Thanks for the two links.

Meanwhile i set up a vSphere environment and it seems that there's no serious difference between ESX 3.5 and 4.0 using vmware-vmrc.

I have to build up a VNC connection within the VM to another PC so i can not use a VNC Client; mouse interactivity is really bad and slow. So vmware-vmrc is my favourite so far.

You mentioned

Main reason for that is that it will not further bog down the service console / CPU0 with the overhead of your remote desktop.

What do you mean with it? I don't know much about the service console yet. By now i only saw it in the network settings in vSphere Client / Infrastructure Client but didn't really think about it.

Any other ideas?

[AntonVZhbankov]

You can give user permissions to see particular VM only, so he will not know about anything else.

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VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru