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How to Access vSphere Remote Console Using vSphere & VMRC API

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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.

Detecting A Duplicate IP Address For Your ESXi Hosts Using a vCenter Alarm

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The motivation for this article was a tweet I noticed from Duncan Epping this morning. Per Duncan's tweet, it looks like he may have accidentally assigned an IP Address to one of his virtual machines which was already being used by an existing ESXi host causing a duplicate IP Address error. We probably have all experienced this once in our lives and it can be quite difficult and frustrating to troubleshoot. Similar to a Windows OS, ESXi can also detect a duplicate IP Addresses but instead of a notification window, it is just logged in the VMkernel logs which looks like the following:

2013-01-21T15:52:35.989Z cpu1:2049)Tcpip_Vmk: 112: arp: 00:50:56:bd:3b:2b is using my IP address 172.30.0.213 on vmk1! 

The biggest challenge of course is to identify which ESXi host actually has a conflict and then taking a look at the logs to find the offending MAC Address and shutting them down yourself or with the help of a Network Administrator. Wouldn't it be great if we had an alarm to automatically notify us when a duplicate IP Address is detected? Well I am glad you asked and the answer is YES! 🙂

In addition to logging to the VMkernel logs, ESXi also logs this "observation" in /var/log/vobd.log which stands for the VMkernel Observation. These "observations" can provide critical identifying information in case of an error and is usually used during troubleshooting. In our case, we are seeing an intermittent network connectivity to our ESXi host which is in result of a duplicate IP Address. The really neat thing about these VOBs is that you can create vCenter Alarms when a specific VOB has been detected. I have shown an example of this before in my Detecting ESXi Remote Syslog Connection Error Using a vCenter Alarm article.

We can do exactly the same for detecting a duplicate IP Address for an ESXi host. The first thing we need to do is identify the VOB ID by looking in /var/log/vobd.log:

2013-01-21T15:02:07.513Z: [netCorrelator] 917174784727us: [esx.problem.net.vmknic.ip.duplicate] Duplicate IP address detected for 172.30.0.83 on interface vmk0, current owner being 00:50:56:bd:3b:2b

We can see the VOB ID for this is esx.problem.net.vmknic.ip.duplicate and this will be used in our vCenter Alarm trigger.

Step 1 - Create a new Alarm and specify a name, the Monitor type will be Hosts and Monitor For will be for a specific event:

Step 2 - Copy the VOB ID that we have identified from above and specify that as our alarm Trigger:

Step 3 - If you wish to receive an email notification or send an SNMP trap go ahead and configure additional actions, else just click next which will just display a vCenter Server alert in the UI.

Now that our alarm has been created, we will want to give this a test drive .... who can we ask? Well it just happens that I have a new user in my environment and I provisioned him a new VM which is already connected to the network. Let's hope he does not try to change the IP Address (because this never happens, right?)

After the user statically assigns the IP Address of an existing ESXi host in the VM, we should see our new alarm trigger in vCenter.

As you can see, we have quickly identified the ESXi host that is impacted and we can then login to DCUI via the console to take a look at the logs to find the offending MAC Address. Hopefully duplicate IP Addresses is not a common problem in your environment but it does happen from time to time and having an alarm to help you quickly narrow down the culprit can be quite useful.

vCloud Suite Virtual Appliances: Passwords, Databases, URLs, etc

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I recently re-organized my home lab and I got rid of a bunch of VMs for random projects that I have been working on last year. Part of this re-organization was to re-deploy a few of the virtual appliances found within the vCloud Suite. As part of the deployment, I often find myself scouring various documents looking for default credentials to the OS, VAMI interface or the application. It is not always easy to find and I often end up going to Google or the VMTN forums for the answer.

As a fun little exercise, I thought why not deploy all of the latest virtual appliance that are available in the vCloud Suite and just document the latest usernames/passwords for the application, OS, VAMI interface, database configurations, URLs, etc.? This would primarily be a reference for myself, but thought it might also benefit others as well. Duncan Epping had done this awhile back for vCloud Director and few other virtual appliance and funny enough, his site was one of the first ones I found for the default vCloud Director password.

Not only have I deployed all the virtual appliances from the vCloud Suite, which can be seen from the screenshot below,  but I also went through each appliance and validated the credentials for the application, OS or VAMI interface if applicable as well as identify all database credentials and configurations which are not all publicly documented (this took a bit of digging in the appliances, but was not too difficult if you know where to look).

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