How to Access vCloud Director Remote Console using vCloud & VMRC API

If you are familiar with the vCloud Director UI and have used the virtual console for a virtual machine, you may have noticed it is serviced by the VMRC (Virtual Machine Remote Console) vCD browser plugin which is only accessible in the vCD UI. If you are building a custom provisioning portal, you may want to provide similar functionality in your own portal for your users to access their VMs.

You can do so by leveraging the vCloud API and the new VMRC API that was made available with the release of vCloud Director 1.5.

In addition to the VMRC API documentation, there is an sample VMRC API Reference Implementation that you can download and experiment with. When you extract the contents of the zip file, you will find an index.html and console.html web page and you can use this locally on your system or host it on a web server.

The index.html is the landing page that you will use to provide the vCloud VM's screen ticket using the vCloud API's AcquireTicket REST API method. The console.html will then load the VMRC for the requested VM assuming you provided a valid screen ticket.

Here are the four simple steps to access a vCloud VM's remote console using the vCloud REST API & VMRC API using curl:

You will need a system that has curl installed and you will need an account in vCD that has access to some powered on VMs. In the example below, I will be logging into a regular organization and not the System organization. There are a few parameters you need to specify to login to vCD and obtain an authorization token. You will need to specify the following parameters and the URL to your vCloud Director instance which should be in the form of https://vcd-fqdn/api/sessions:

• -i = Include headers
• -k = Performs an "insecure" SSL connection
• -H = Setting the header for the version of vCloud Director (1.5 in this example)
• -u = User credentials in the format of [username@org:password]
• -X = Request type

Note: For more details on the cURL flags, please refer to the cURL documentation.

curl -i -k -H "Accept:application/*+xml;version=1.5" -u coke-admin@Coke:vmware -X POST https://vcd.primp-industries.com/api/sessions

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2012 22:20:54 GMT
x-vcloud-authorization: n/+ZglmIwJ2SbWlyz04XC5sHUDJqefU1mCMa9TFu9lk=
Set-Cookie: vcloud-token=n/+ZglmIwJ2SbWlyz04XC5sHUDJqefU1mCMa9TFu9lk=; Secure; Path=/
Content-Type: application/vnd.vmware.vcloud.session+xml;version=1.5
Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2012 22:20:55 GMT
Content-Length: 894


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Session xmlns="http://www.vmware.com/vcloud/v1.5" user="coke-admin" org="Coke" type="application/vnd.vmware.vcloud.session+xml" href="https://vcd.primp-industries.com/api/session/" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.vmware.com/vcloud/v1.5 http://172.30.0.139/api/v1.5/schema/master.xsd">
<Link rel="down" type="application/vnd.vmware.vcloud.orgList+xml" href="https://vcd.primp-industries.com/api/org/"/>
<Link rel="down" type="application/vnd.vmware.admin.vcloud+xml" href="https://vcd.primp-industries.com/api/admin/"/>
<Link rel="down" type="application/vnd.vmware.vcloud.query.queryList+xml" href="https://vcd.primp-industries.com/api/query"/>
<Link rel="entityResolver" type="application/vnd.vmware.vcloud.entity+xml" href="https://vcd.primp-industries.com/api/entity/"/>
</Session>

If you have successfully logged in, you should get an HTTP 200 response and get similar output as above. You will need to make note of your authorization token which is located on the third line that starts with "x-vcloud-authorization". This will be needed throughout the remainder of the session

Using the new Query Service API in vCloud 1.5, we will locate all VMs within the vCD instance with the vm type. If you are logged in as a System Administrator and using the System Org, use the adminVM type instead. You can see the command is very similar to the one above but instead of specifying the credentials, we are using the authorization token from step 1. We are also including specific fields in the XML output for readability (VM name + vApp name), if you remove '&fields=name,containerName', you will see the other fields in the XML response. We also want to filter for only powered-on VMs, we can do this by adding '&filter=status==POWERED_ON'.

curl -i -k -H "Accept:application/*+xml;version=1.5" -H "x-vcloud-authorization: n/+ZglmIwJ2SbWlyz04XC5sHUDJqefU1mCMa9TFu9lk=" -X GET "https://vcd.primp-industries.com/api/query?type=vm&filter=status==POWERED_ON&fields=name,containerName"

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2012 22:22:09 GMT
Content-Type: application/*+xml;version=1.5
Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2012 22:22:09 GMT
Content-Length: 1356

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<QueryResultRecords xmlns="http://www.vmware.com/vcloud/v1.5" total="2" pageSize="25" page="1" name="vm" type="application/vnd.vmware.vcloud.query.records+xml" href="https://vcd.primp-industries.com/api/query?type=vm&page=1&pageSize=25&format=records&filter=status==POWERED_ON&fields=name,containerName" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.vmware.com/vcloud/v1.5 http://172.30.0.139/api/v1.5/schema/master.xsd">
<Link rel="alternate" type="application/vnd.vmware.vcloud.query.references+xml" href="https://vcd.primp-industries.com/api/query?type=vm&page=1&pageSize=25&format=references&filter=status==POWERED_ON&fields=name,containerName"/>
<Link rel="alternate" type="application/vnd.vmware.vcloud.query.idrecords+xml" href="https://vcd.primp-industries.com/api/query?type=vm&page=1&pageSize=25&format=idrecords&filter=status==POWERED_ON&fields=name,containerName"/>
<VMRecord name="WebServerVM" containerName="WebServer-Test-1" href="https://vcd.primp-industries.com/api/vApp/vm-25a4228e-1202-45a7-8f85-cafaeb1c3bc8"/>
<VMRecord name="ApplicationVM" containerName="AppTesting" href="https://vcd.primp-industries.com/api/vApp/vm-fadffc47-fa24-4ca0-9a90-f1048bc9f731"/>
</QueryResultRecords>

If the operation was successful, you should see a HTTP 200 response and list of VMs in your vCD instance. You will need to make a note of the VM's href property that you wish to obtain the remote console screen ticket for which is needed in the next step.

Next we need to obtain the screen ticket using the AcquireTicket vCloud REST API method. You will need to perform a POST operation and using the href property from the previous step, append "/screen/action/acquireTicket". This link is only available IF the VM is powered-on and must be used within 30seconds or it will be considered invalid.

curl -i -k -H "Accept:application/*+xml;version=1.5" -H "x-vcloud-authorization: n/+ZglmIwJ2SbWlyz04XC5sHUDJqefU1mCMa9TFu9lk=" -X POST https://vcd.primp-industries.com/api/vApp/vm-25a4228e-1202-45a7-8f85-cafaeb1c3bc8/screen/action/acquireTicket

HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2012 22:23:21 GMT Content-Type: application/vnd.vmware.vcloud.screenticket+xml;version=1.5 Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2012 22:23:21 GMT Content-Length: 895 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <ScreenTicket xmlns="http://www.vmware.com/vcloud/v1.5" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.vmware.com/vcloud/v1.5 http://172.30.0.139/api/v1.5/schema/master.xsd">mks://172.30.0.140/vm-180?ticket=cst-HtefHNvLNiLmfK1na3mx74rqmLmM%2FjhWu3UHHTFrRlnGZg%2FtgjfqwanE4HUvWgvaclaR5vRI3iJrOvJS4P%2Fq6vH%2FfU06v0kMJ4U1ngSCNnt2SmHpaazWp%2B7JPLMCPQz0f88bxnU3t2NIX3bn%2BrsIznRNaDkQeIEldti%2F7pWsH%2FWm1PGIAk%2Fh54IpBuaGmlwPtNjs40zGTLjSYzRtO9oII75jgWA%2F%2FVcRBXtIPgoQzL4GHpyS6PZ7vaTklxdjCUJklJnlAbpVjo7P5uUqzfhhFQa52GNxZK%2FCLS6nNJpVkmvV12J5aUwsWe3OXdecsckW%2By3VLdcKe9Fp8N44TEgGfqrjzvCsXOv5DbiChjrfhIBKlUhN2%2BHL2fHqbtrBbKvtteNERMl08cqExR7qyf4n1w%3D%3D-X6PBbcMUeRCaF5G6lkqOrrdPbjm%2FfLOj1Exk8w%3D%3D--tp-9B%3A2B%3A82%3A8D%3AA2%3AFD%3AF1%3A8F%3A42%3A20%3ABF%3A75%3AA9%3A4F%3AFA%3AA6%3AC4%3A09%3ACA%3A4F--</ScreenTicket>

Now we just need to take the screen ticket which starts with mks://..... and copy that over to our VMRC sample web page and hit the submit button. If everything was successful, you should see the a remote console popup up for the VM you had just requested the screen ticket from. You will also notice the IP Address in the screen ticket is not the same address as your vCloud Director Cell, it is actually the console proxy address if you were wondering why the IP is different.

So this is great, but you still need some interaction with the browser to actually submit the screen ticket request. What if we just wanted to provide a single URL that would automatically launch the remote console for a requested VM? You can definitely do so, but you will need to perform a URL encoding on the mks://... ticket and construct the proper URL.

Here is a simple shell script called vcloud-vAppRemoteConsole.sh that uses the same vCloud REST API calls as above and allows a user to select the vCloud VM to to retrieve a screen ticket and returns back a single URL to access the remote console of the VM.

The script requires three parameters: (username@organization, password and vcloud-host)

Here is an sample execution:

Once you have successfully logged in, you should see a list of VMs that are currently powered on (highlighted in blue). You will need to select a VM and provide the "href" property as input (highlighted in green). Then the AcquireTicket method will be called and the screen ticket is then encoded using a quick Perl one-liner. The encoded entry is then appended to the hosted URL of the VMRC sample https://air.primp-industries.com/vmrc/console.html? (you can replace the URL to fit your environment). The output of the script (highlighted in orange) is the URL you would then paste into a supported web browser and the remote console will automatically launch without any additional user input.

With the above knowledge, you can easily translate this using any of the vCloud SDKs (Java, .NET, PHP), vCO or the new vCloud Director cmdlets and provide console access to your vCloud VMs.

Note: For vSphere virtual machine remote console access instructions, please take a look at this article here.