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

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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.

vmrc
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:

vmrc-0
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

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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:

vsphere-55u2-html5-console-https-webmks

VMware Product Managers on Twitter

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VMworld is a great event for customers to connect with VMware Product Managers to provide feedback on their current challenges, issues and feature requests for our current products as well as future roadmaps and directions. However, this should not be the only time a customer can directly engage with our product managers. Last week at VMworld, I found myself connecting numerous customers and account managers to the various product managers at VMware to ensure that their feedback was heard by the right person.

This was quite tough as I become the middle-man and potentially bottleneck. Looking back on the event, I realized it would have been nice if customers could directly reach out to the various product managers within their respective areas and not only during VMworld but throughout the year. This is where I think Social Media can be quite powerful and leveraging tools like Twitter, you can easily provide a way for customers (for those that use Twitter) to reach out to the various product managers. I knew there were a few VMware Product Managers that were on Twitter, but during the week of VMworld I came across a couple new ones that I had not known about such as my good buddy Greg Murrary who is the PM for Appliances, Logging Infrastructure and the Platform Services Controller.

I figure it might be useful to create a list of all VMware Product Managers & Technical Product Managers that are on Twitter and share that with the VMware Community so that you can reach out to these folks when you have any questions, feedback or requests. Do not be shy, these are very friendly folks and I know they definitely would love to engage the community even more and this is another way you can directly interact with them! If there are others, please leave a comment with your contact information.

I have also created a Twitter list called VMwareProductManagers if you wish to just follow all VMware Product Managers.

Name Twitter Handle Responsibility
Aaron Blasius AaronBlasius ESXi Hardware Enablement
Alan Renouf alanrenouf VMware Automation: CLI + SDK + API
Alex Jauch ajauch VMware Cloud on AWS
Antoan Arnaudov antoan_arnaudov vSphere Auditing + Events + Alarms + Performance Charts + Logging
Ben Meadowcroft BenMeadowcroft VVOL
Bo Dong dbo_vmw VCSA Migration + Install & Upgrade
Bo Fu tofubo Fusion
Brian Graf vBrianGraf Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) + Predictive DRS + Proactive HA
Dennis Lu dennisgoblu vSphere Web Client (Flex) + vSphere HTML5 Web Client (H5)
Forbes Guthrie forbesguthrie VMware Validated Design (VVD)
Greg Murray gregmmurray Photon OS + Appliance Management & VCSA
Karthik Narayan _karthiknarayan vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC)
Matt Dreyer matt_dreyer VMware Cloud on AWS
Nakul Jamadagni jnacool vMotion + xVC-vMotion + Instant Clone
Narayan Bharadwaj nadubharadwaj VMware Cloud on AWS
Pat Lee patlee Horizon Air + Remote Experience Clients + 3D + Horizon FLEX + Fusion + Workstation
Rakesh Nair MynameisNair Virtual SAN (vSAN)
Ray Budavari rbudavari NSX
Roman Konarev RomanKonarev vSphere Content Library + vSphere HA
Sachin Thakkar sachin_t vCloud Air
Salil Suri SalilSuri ESXi Platform + ESXi Security + VMware Tools
Swaroop Dutta SwaroopvDutta Virtual SAN (vSAN)
Thomas Corfmat tcorfmat vRealize Automation
Venky Deshpande VMWNetworking NSX
Vishwa Srikaanth wishhva vCenter Server Performance + Scale
Yiting Jin YitingJin VMRC + Multi-vCenter Management + Fault Tolerance
Ziv Kalmanovich zivkal vSphere GPU Enablement