X on a VMWare Console

[phillipfromoz]

Hi,

I'm new to VMWare.

I want to be able to run X (graphics software) on the vmware console for a virutal machine
running Redhat 5.8.

I am using ESXi 4.

There is the getty process which presumeably is used for the command line prompt on the console.

There is very little on the internet about X on the console.

Questions
=========
1. Is it possible to run X on the console?
2. I think that you need some vmware tools so achieve this. Is this correct?
3. I suppose that you need the X server and X client software to be installed within Redhat.
   Is this correct?
4. When you are ready to run the X client I guess you need to set:
   export DISPLAY=<IP adress of VM box>:0.0
   xhosts +
   Is this correct?
5. What is happening is the user wants to run an X installer and wants to run this on the console
   instead of an ssh connection with X on the pc. The reason why the pc solution won't work is that
   the ssh connection times out after 5 hours of inactivity. Is there a better to run this rather than
   using X on the console

Thanks for any help.

[NealeC]

You could do this using Directpath

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=101078...

This allows you to reserve a PCI device in your host for use by a Guest VM.  This was original intended for things like NICs or Storage HBAs but it can be done with the VGA card too.

This would mean that, once configured, the vga port of your server would display the VMs screen and not the ESXi DCUI

If you didn't put a typo above and are indeed running ESX "i" then the i means that you don't actually have a redhat console to install X windows into.

If you are running full ESX (not esxi) then it may be possible but it will hamper your hypervisor's work of scheduling VMs, so it wouldn't be recommended.

There are also lots of videos on youtube showing Windows 7 for example running as a VM on a host with it's screen output redirected to the host's VGA.