VMRC

VMware Cloud on AWS 1.13 adds support for VMRC vCenter Proxy

12/09/2020 by William Lam Leave a Comment

VMware Cloud on AWS (VMConAWS) 1.13 was just released and although it is an optional release, it does introduce a pretty interesting capability that I think our customers will really appreciate and benefit from, especially when this capability also makes its way into an on-premises vSphere release.

VMware Remote Console (VMRC) vCenter Proxy

VMware Remote Console connections will now be proxied through the SDDC’s vCenter, and clients no longer require connectivity to ESXi hosts. This simplifies connectivity requirements, and allows for the use of VMRC over VPN when a DX or vTGW is also being used with the SDDC.

Historically, when you wanted to interact with a Virtual Machine using the vSphere UI in vCenter Server, you had two options. You can either use the HTML5 Remote Console within your browser or you could use the standalone VMware Remote Console (VMRC) application. For basic functionality, the HTML5 console is generally preferred but for cases where you might need to mount a local device from your computer such as a USB, bluetooth or CD-ROM device, you had to use the VMRC client.

How to audit vSphere Standalone VMRC or HTML5 VMRC connections?

07/11/2016 by William Lam Leave a Comment

An interesting question that came in last week from one of our TAMs was how to identify and audit Virtual Machine Remote Console (VMRC) logins from vSphere? The TAM was specifically interested in being able to correlate that a particular user had logged into the VMRC of a VM during a specific period of time. Luckily, this is easily retrievable through vCenter Servers's Event sub-system that stores information about everything that happens in your vSphere environment. The Events can be accessed using either the vSphere Web Client shown below or programmatically using the vSphere API which the UI is built on top of.

You can obviously filter your search in the UI and focus on a particular VM, but often times there can be dozens if not hundreds of "Events" generated for a given VM. I personally prefer to leverage Automation when needing to look for a specific type of Event and more importantly, you can further process the results to either send out reports or hook into other third party systems. Now that we know, "where" to find our data, the next thing is identifying the type of Event that is generated for a VMRC connection.

As of vSphere 5.5 Update 2b, the VMRC in the vSphere Web Client can be accessed in one of two ways: The new HTML5 VMRC by clicking onto the VM screenshot thumbnail or the Standalone VMRC by clicking on the link directly beneath the VM screenshot.

Each VMRC connection method will generate a unique vCenter Server Event. For HTML5 VMRC connections, the Event is called VmAcquiredMksTicketEvent and for Standalone VMRC connections, the Event is called VmAcquiredTicketEvent. As I mentioned earlier, the vCenter Server Event sub-system can be accessed using the vSphere API and you can find the complete list of Events documented here. To demonstrate the use of this particular vSphere API, below is a PowerCLI example using the Get-VIEvent cmdlet. My fellow colleague Alan Renouf has actually blogged about working with Events using PowerCLI which I will be adapting one of his examples for our use case.

We first retrieve the VM that we are interested in by running the following command (specify the name of your VM):

$vm = Get-VM -Name "VCSA-60u2"

To retrieve HTML5 VMRC connections, run the following PowerCLI command:

Get-VIEvent -Entity $vm | Where { $_.Gettype().Name -eq "VmAcquiredMksTicketEvent"} | Select CreatedTime, UserName, FullFormattedMessage | ft -wrap -AutoSize

Here is an example of what the output would look like

To retrieve Standalone VMRC connections, run the following PowerCLI command:

Get-VIEvent -Entity $vm | Where { $_.Gettype().Name -eq "VmAcquiredTicketEvent"} | Select CreatedTime, UserName, UserAgent, FullFormattedMessage | ft -wrap -AutoSize

Here is an example of what the output would look like:

How to restrict access to both the Standalone VMRC & HTML5 VM Console?

12/08/2015 by William Lam 10 Comments

Several weeks back there were a couple of questions from our field asking about locking down access to a Virtual Machine's Console which includes both the new Standalone VMRC (Windows & Mac OS X) which runs on your desktop as well as the new HTML5 VM Console which runs in the browser. Below is a screenshot of the vSphere Web Client showing how to access the two different types of VM Consoles.

To prevent users from accessing either of the VM Consoles which also applies to the vSphere C# Client, you can leverage vSphere's extensive Role Based Access Control (RBAC) system. The specific privilege that governs whether a user can access the VM Console is under VirtualMachine->Interaction->Console interaction as seen in the screenshot below.

If a user is not granted the following privilege for a particular VM, when they click on either the Standalone VMRC link or the HTML5 VM Console, they will get permission denied and the screen will be blank. Pretty simple if you want to prevent users from accessing the VM Console or allowing only VM Console access when they login.

UPDATE (01/31/17): If you are using VMRC 8.1 or greater, you no longer need the additional permission assignment on the ESXi level if you ONLY want to provide VM Console access, just assign it to the VM. However, if you need to provide device management such as mounting an ISO on the client side, then you will still need to assign VMRC role (along with the required privileges for device management) at the ESXi host level.

UPDATE (12/15/15): If you want to restrict users from having ONLY VM Console access which may include the Standalone VMRC, you will need to ensure that the user has the role applied not only on the VMs you wish to restrict but also at the ESXi host level since Standalone VMRC still requires access to ESXi host. You do not need to grant read-only permissions for the user at the ESXi level, but you just need to assign the user "VMRC" only role at the ESXi level or higher to ensure they can connect to the VMRC.

Standalone VMRC (VM Remote Console) re-introduced in vSphere 5.5 Update 2b

10/10/2014 by William Lam 53 Comments

The VMRC (VM Remote Console) has gone through several transitions from initially being available as a standalone Windows application to an integrated browser based plugin with the release of the vSphere Web Client. In the latest vSphere 5.5 Update 2b release, a new standalone VMRC has been re-introduced to provide an alternative way to launch a VM console. The reason for this is due to the deprecated and eventual removal of NPAPI (Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface) based plugin support from all modern web browsers which the current VMRC implementation leverages. Here is a quick excerpt from the vSphere 5.5 Update 2b release notes:

Inability to open virtual machine console using Google Chrome browser when NPAPI support is deprecated
When the NPAPI support in Google Chrome is deprecated, the virtual machine console provided in the vSphere Client Integration Plugin might no longer function when the Chrome browser is updated. As a result, you might be unable to open the virtual machine console using the Google Chrome browser and you might not be able to connect to devices.

UPDATE (10/21/14) - Looks like the standalone VMRC has just been made available and you can now download it by either following the link in the vSphere Web Client if you are on vSphere 5.5 Update 2b OR simply by going to http://www.vmware.com/go/download-vmrc

UPDATE (10/12/14) - It looks like the standalone VMRC is currently not available for download just yet. You can continue using the existing methods to connect to your VM Console, the new Standalone VMRC is NOT required but the links have been put in place to proactively get ready for NPAPI deprecation (more details below). You can subscribe to VMware KB 2091284 which will be updated when the download is available.

UPDATE (05/31/15) - If you are connecting directly to an ESXi host you can either use the vSphere API to query for the VM MoRef ID or you can easily pull it by running the following command directly in the ESXi Shell:

vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms

The deprecation of NPAPI support is nothing new and has actually been communicated by all major web browsers for quite some time now. To ensure that VMware customers are not affected when this change goes into effect, a new standalone VMRC is being introduced to preempt the upcoming change and provides a new way of launching a VM console using the vSphere Web Client as seen in the screenshot below.

To be able to open a VM Console using the new standalone VMRC, you will of course need to have it installed first. You can find the link to the download on VMware.com but there is also a direct link provided on the VM Summary page in the vSphere Web Client. In addition to the new standalone VMRC, you will still be able to use the existing method as well as the HTML5 based VM console. The HTML5 console continues to work if you do not have CIP (Client Integration Package) installed on your Windows system or if you are running on a Mac OS X system. I am sure many of you are probably asking when will there be Mac OS X version of VMRC? I know I definitely am 🙂 The good news is that this is being worked on and hopefully we will see a Mac OS X version in the very near future.

Furthermore, the new standalone VMRC also includes some nice enhancements that I know some of you have been asking for, especially those that have used the previous standalone VMRC application. The new VMRC can now be directly launched using the following two URI methods:

vmrc://[USERNAME]@[VC]/?moid=[VM-MOREF-ID]
vmrc://clone:[VC-TICKET]@[VC]/?moid=[VM-MOREF-ID]

Here is a screenshot of the standalone VMRC application:

The first method accepts basic authentication using username/password, the vCenter Server address and the VM MoRef Id. Here is an example of what that would look like:

C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Remote Console\vmrc.exe vmrc://*protected email*/?moid=vm-37

The second method accepts a vCenter Server session ticket which you can generate by using vSphere API acquireCloneTicket() method. A quick way to test this example is by using the vSphere MOB and making a call to acquireCloneTicket using the following URL https://[VCENTER-SERVER]/mob/?moid=SessionManager&method=acquireCloneTicket and then specifying the ticket as seen in the example below.

C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Remote Console\vmrc.exe vmrc://clone:*protected email*/?moid=vm-37

With the new URI handler, you can automatically associate it with the standalone VMRC application which means you can type this into a browser or into a Windows explorer and it will automatically launch VMRC. The other nice thing about the new standalone VMRC is if you would like to reduce the complexity of getting a regular use connected to their desktop, you can easily use the standalone VMRC and dynamically generating a link for your end users to access their VMs without ever exposing them to the underlying vSphere infrastructure. I suspect there will be some really interesting use cases for the new standalone VMRC and the VMRC team will continue to iterate to make it better based on customer feedback.

HTML5 console now defaults to HTTPS/WSS in vSphere 5.5 Update 2

09/24/2014 by William Lam 5 Comments

I just found out from one of my readers that with the latest release of vSphere 5.5 Update 2, the HTML5 Console in vCenter Server now goes over a secure connection (HTTPS) as well as using secure web socket connection (WSS) by default. In addition to this change, the HTML5 console port has also been changed from 7331 to 7343. I know customers have asking about this in the past and though this was not possible with previous releases, I am glad to see that VMware Engineering has now added this capablity, another reason to go to vSphere 5.5 Update 2!

This new change is also documented in the vSphere 5.5 Update release notes, which I some how must have missed:

Virtual machines with HTML 5 console in vSphere 5.5 open connections with http:// instead of https://
When the HTML 5 console is launched on a virtual machine, it uses connections like http:// and web sockets like ws:// instead of secure connections like https:// and wss://.

This release resolves the issue by launching the virtual machine console with secure connection over port 7343 instead of the connection over port 7331.

For those of you using my generateHTML5VMConsole script to generate a pre-authenticated HTML5 VM Console, I have updated the script to include a new variable called isvSphere55u2 which will default to "false" but you can set it in the command-line to "true" and this will automatically generate a URL using HTTPS instead of HTTP and use port 7343 instead of 7331. Other than these two minor changes, the URL format is exactly the same and will continue to work.

Here is a quick screenshot of the HTML5 VM Console URL in my lab running vSphere 5.5 Update 2:

Quick Tip – Enabling HTML5 VM Console in the vSphere Web Client for IE

05/08/2014 by William Lam 13 Comments

One of the biggest feature that I was most excited for with the initial release of vSphere 5.5, was the full support for Mac OS X with the vSphere Web Client. For many Mac OS X users including myself, this meant you could finally upload OVF/OVA, have support for remote device management such as mounting an ISO or floppy image and the biggest one of them all is having a supported native VM Console (based on HTML5)!

During the early Alpha/Beta release of vSphere 5.5, I started to use the VM Console for Mac OS X quite a bit. One thing that I had noticed was the HTML5 VM console was only used when you are running on a Mac OS X system. If you are on Windows or Linux system, it would still default to VMRC if you did not have the CIP (Client Integration Package) installed which included the VMRC. If you did not have CIP installed, then it would then default to the HTML5 VM Console as an alternative.

Last night, I saw a tweet from Steve Kaplan which seemed to indicate this behavior had changed:

I luckily had a Windows system that did not have CIP installed and took a quick look and found the following:

On both Chrome and Firefox, the HTML5 VM Console was available, you should see a "Launch Console" under the Virtual Machine summary page
On Internet Explorer (9,10 & 11), the HTML5 VM Console was not available and there was no "Launch Console" link

It appears that the behavior did in fact change between Beta and GA of vSphere which was kind of a shame ...

Not being satisfied with the answer, I was still hoping I could help find a solution for my buddy Steve. I think it would still be useful to be able to view the Virtual Machine console w/o having CIP installed, especially if you don't require the functionality of CIP. Thinking about it a for a bit, I had an idea that was worth a shot. I decided to change the User-Agent on the Internet Explorer to make it show up to the vSphere Web Client as Firefox versus Internet Explorer to see what would happen.

To my surprise, as you can see from the screenshot above, it worked! I guess the vSphere Web Client specifically looks for the browser type and if it is Internet Explorer, we only provide the CIP installer versus using the HTML5 VM Console. I'm not exactly sure why that is the case, but at least there is a work around. Here are the instructions if you wish to change the User Agent on IE. I also found that this worked on both IE10 and 11 but not IE9.

Disclaimer: This may not be officially supported by VMware, but you probably already know the drill 😉

This is a nice workaround if you are using the vSphere Web Client, but if you do not want to go through this hassle you can ALWAYS access the HTML5 VM Console by generating the URL itself and this will always work on ALL browsers without any workarounds. Here is a nice script that I created which will handle this for you. Web Client 0, Customer 1 🙂