Can't connect to VM console over WAN

[CWSI]

Hi guys,

We have a couple of ESXi 4.1U1 hosts and a vCenter server in our datacenter.  I can connect to the MKS console of the VMs directly from the vCenter server (it's a physical box) no problem.  I can RDP to the vCenter server and connec to the MKS however I get the usual issue of repeated characters when I type which makes it almost useless, I could edit the .vmx of each VM to change the key auto repeat setting but this is a bit messy with more then a few VMs.  So the advice from the VMware forums seems to be to put a viclient on your remote PC and connect to the vCenter server (instead of RDPing to vCenter), so I opened 443, 902 and 903 through the firewall to the vCenter machine and connected from my home PC.  Ic an connect to vCenter fine but cannot connect to the console - "Unable to connect to the MKS: Failed to connect to server 192.168.104.51:902".  This makes sense because the 192.168.104.51 address is the LAN IP of one of the ESX hosts, so my home PC obviously can't talk to that IP.

From reading around the solution is to change the vmauthd.server.alwaysProxy=TRUE using the service console, however I'm not too familiar with the service console and actually thought there wasn't a service console with ESXi anyway?

Any ideas?

Thanks!

[DSTAVERT]

Welcome to the Communities.

I would suggest the opposite is the better choice. RDP to the remote location and connect to vCenter. Much easier and smoother. vSphere client on the local machine connecting to a remote vCenter will be frustrating. If you loose a connection you may be caught in an unknown condition. If you loose an RDP session during an operation the operation will continue and you can reconnect.

[kjb007]

The /etc/vmware/config file still exists in vSphere 5 as well.  ESXI still has a small shell, and you can use this kb for help.  http://kb.vmware.com/kb/749640

-KjB

[trentrae10]

According to your information port 902 is still being blocked somewhere along the line.  Could be at your at your modem(as many new ones have a builtin firewall), router or pc at your house?

[CWSI]

Thanks for the replies guys!

I would much prefer to RDP to the vCenter box then use the viclient from there, but I'm having the repeated characters issues as per http://kb.vmware.com/kb/196 and don't really feel that editing every VM config file is feasibile (or that it should be necessary given how long this issue has existed in VMware).  If there's a better way to get this working I'd love to hear it!

I'm pretty confident the ports are open correctly to the vCenter server as I had them pointed at one of the hosts directly at one point and was able to connect, I just switched the IPs on the firewall rules. What seems strange is that I can't telnet to 902 or 903 of the vCenter server, even locally from it, should I be able to or am I missing an MKS proxy add-in or something?

So just to confirm, is vmauthd.server.alwaysProxy = "TRUE" definitely supported on ESXi then?

Thanks!

[kjb007]

Yes, and the instructions and other supporting info is in the KB I posted earlier.

-KjB

[CWSI]

Hi guys,

It turns out using TeamViewer to conenct remotely to the vCenter server works properly, so I'll just use this instead of RDP.  Hopefully someday VMware will make whatever changes are necessary to allow use of RDP...

Thanks,

Philip