In vCenter, selecting Web Console or Remote Console, yields a window with a blank screen

[daveclaussen]

Hi all - another strange one here.

We run VCSA 6.7U3G, ESXi v6.7U3 P04 and I have VMware Workstation v15.5Pro installed on my Windows 10 PC.

Almost any time I try to start a remote console to any VM in our environment, the window will open, but remain blank no matter where I click or what keys I press. This happens when I select Web Console or Remote Console. It will only try to open the console in VMware Workstation, I do not have an option for just another tab in Chrome. Speaking of Chrome, I have tried this in Chrome, Edge and FireFox on multiple machines. I even went so far as to uninstall VMware Workstation and instal the latest VMRC. That worked once, but had the same blank screen issue everytime after that. The user account I am using is AD authenticated and has full admin permissions.I even tried logging into vCenter with administratior@vsphere.local to see if that made a difference. That worked a few times, but then started showing the same issue.  If I login to to the host on which the VM resides, and open a remote console from there - it works every time.

Any help is appreciated - this is now affecting my work.

- Dave

[scott28tt]

@daveclaussen 

Could this be a networking/firewall issue?

[nachogonzalez]

Quick question, do you have VM encryption enabled?

[daveclaussen]

No. I had the security team verify that there are no blocks in between the vCenter server and the hosts, between vCenter and my PC and no blocks between the hosts and my PC.

[daveclaussen]

We are not using VM encryption.

[daveclaussen · Accepted solution]

I found a person that had the exact same issue. What they did was change the registry on their PC to "force" the use of the VMRC whenever you tried to open a remote console. That actually worked for me. Sometimes it would not work when I selected Remote Console and I'd have to select Web Console, but one of the two options would work in each or my tests. It opened the VMRC each time and Workstation was bypassed altogether.

HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Classes\vmrc\DefaultIcon -Value '"C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Remote Console\vmrc.exe",0'
HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Classes\vmrc\shell\open\command -Value '"C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Remote Console\vmrc.exe" "%1"'

Obviously this only works if you have VMRC installed and it is installed in the default location.

I hope this helps others.