Remote desktop not connectingg to windows 10 vm on esxi 6.0

[rayatpep]

Hello, 

Originally a windows 10 virtual machine would allow RDP connections on Port 3390 from a machine on the same local network.  Now, i cant connect to RDP on these machine.   

Why would this have changed?   No firewalls active and all on the same subnet.  I can ping the ip address of the the virtual machine but can not get a response when looking at Port 3390 as configured in windows in the VM.   

What am  missing?

I found what i was missing.   The AVG Business Antivirus Firewall settings were weird.   I have to set the advanced firewall to on to activate connection sharing then disable the advance firewall again.  Dumb way for this to work.

[a_p_]

There's nothing in ESXi which would block traffic, so you may want to double check the guest operating firewall to ensure that the required port is reachable. Does netstat -a list the port as listening?
Unless you are already aware of it, Microsoft offers a free tool to test connections for given ports (see https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=17148).

Please don't mind me asking, but why did you change the RDP port?

André

[rayatpep]

Changed the RDP port to allow port forwarding to manage RDP through the internet gateway firewall to connect from outside the LAN for multiple systems behind a single IP.  

[sguadamu1]

Check there is no NSX in your infrastructure. NSX has a DFW and could be blocking your request. Also, did you try telnet + port to the required VM?

Best Regards.

[scott28tt]

Which VMware product do you suspect might be involved in this not working, or don’t you think it’s related to any VMware product?

[a_p_]

>>> Changed the RDP port to allow port forwarding to manage RDP through the internet gateway firewall to connect from outside the LAN for multiple systems behind a single IP.

For such a case, it's actually not the Port in your Windows guests which you want to modify, but rather configure port forwarding on your firewall, e.g.

Port 3390 -> PC-1 port 3389
Port 3391 -> PC-2 port 3389
...

André

[rayatpep]

To close this out: 

The connecting workstation was being blocked from using outgoing RDP.  I checked RDP from a different workstation and it worked fine.   

That led me back to the firewall and antivirus on the client that i was connecting from.   Not sure why but, was able to resolve the firewall problem.  AVG Business antivirus Firewall was turned on and had a setting called Share network connection blocked.  after enabling this, it works as it should.   Additionally just turning off the firewall did not allow the connection to work.  I had to enable the "share network connection" then disable again before it would connect.   

Thanks for the ideas!

Also, the Vsphere esxi is running version 6.0 of both vshpere and hypervisor.

[scott28tt]

So, in conclusion, nothing to do with any VMware product. At least you got it resolved.

[sguadamu1]

Hey Scott, 

It will be NSX-V / T. It is a VMware product which contains DFW (Distributed Firewall) which is used for traffic East-West inspection. Also NSX has Gateway Firewall wich is used for traffic North - South inspection. 

And I was just wondering if there was new FW rule blocking the traffic.

Best Regards.

SG

[scott28tt]

The resolution seems to have been client-centric, nothing to do with NSX (or any other VMware product)