How to Access vSphere Remote Console Using vSphere & VMRC API

Similar to my vCloud Director article, you can also provide access to the remote console of a virtual machine in a vSphere environment to your end users. This can be accomplished by leveraging both the vSphere and VMRC (Virtual Machine Remote Console) APIs and can be useful if you are building a custom portal for users to access their virtual machines. To use the VMRC API, you can download the latest VMRC 5.1 SDK which provides the following:

The VMRC SDK allows you to use a Web-based application to connect to a vCenter- or vCloud Director-managed virtual machine and access that virtual machine’s console in a browser window. You can interact with the virtual machine console input and screen. You can also use the VMRC SDK to manage virtual and physical device connections on a vCenter-managed virtual machine.

The VMRC SDK includes documentation to the API as well as a sample webpage implementing some basic functionality of the VMRC API. I recently received a question on how to get started with the sample as it was not completely intuitive and thought I take you through the required steps to get the sample working.

Step 1 - Download the VMRC 5.1 SDK and extract the contents to your local desktop.

Step 2 - Open the vmrc-embed-example.html using a web browser located in the docs folder.

Note: In my example, I uploaded both the javascript and html file to a web server and accessed the sample by connecting to the server instead of running it locally on my desktop. This was to show how users could access the custom portal using the VMRC SDK.

Step 3 - At the top of the page where it says "VMRC Modes", make "MKS" is selected in the drop down box and click on the "+" icon to add. Then go ahead and click on the "Start" button to start a VMRC instance and ensure you see a success message on the right hand side of the console box.

Step 4 - To authenticate to VMRC, you will need a session ticket which will be obtained through the use of the vSphere API using the acquireCloneTicket() method provided by the SessionManager managed object. In this example, we will be using the vSphere MOB to quickly retrieve our session ticket, but in a real implementation, you would programamtically retrieve the session ticket along with few othe pieces of information to connect to the VMRC. Open up a new tab in your web browser and connect to the following URL:

https://reflex.primp-industries.com/mob/?moid=SessionManager&method=acquireCloneTicket

Note: Make sure you substitute in your vCenter Server IP Address/Hostname

Once you have authenticated, go ahead and click on the "Invoke Method" which should generate a session ticket:

Step 5 - Copy the session ticket string and go back to our VMRC sample page. We will now need to fill out the following sections before we can access the remote console of a virtual machine:

• Hostname (IP Address/Hostname of your vCenter Server)
• Allow SSL Validation Errors (Check this if you are using self signed SSL certificates)
• Ticket (Paste the session ticket from the previous step here)
• VM ID (This is the MoRef ID of the VM you wish to connect to the remote console)

Once you have filled out the minimum required fields, go ahead and click on the "Connect" button and if everything was successful, you should now see the remote console of the virtual machine you selected.