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Standalone VMRC now available for Mac OS X

04.15.2015 by William Lam // 55 Comments

Last year, a standalone Virtual Machine Remote Console (VMRC) was released for Windows as part of vSphere 5.5 Update 2b which provides an alternative way of launching the VM console due to NPAPI deprecation. There was of course a huge request for Mac OS X support and the VMRC team has been working hard and today I am please to announce that standalone VMRC is now available for Apple Mac OS X which you can download using the following URL: www.vmware.com/go/download-vmrc

Note: Mac OS X 10.8 or greater is required to use the new Standalone VMRC. The release notes will be updated to reflect this requirement

There are currently two methods of launching a remote console to a Virtual Machine using the vSphere Web Client as seen in the screenshot below:

Using HTML5 VMRC simply by clicking on the thumbnail preview
Using the new Standalone VMRC by clicking on the "Launch Remote Console" link

When using the Standalone VMRC method, instead of opening the VM console in the browser, it will launch the native VMRC application on your system whether that be Windows or Mac OS X. All basic functionalities of the Standalone VMRC is available as you would expect such as power operations, device management, etc.

Note: There is not a specific version of vSphere that is required to directly launch the Standalone VMRC. However, to launch it within the vSphere Web Client, you will need vSphere 5.5 Update 2b or greater.

The other great thing about the Standalone VMRC is that it can function without vCenter Server and the vSphere Web Client and you can actually use it to connect to VM directly on an ESXi host. To use the VMRC without the vSphere Web Client, you will need to construct the VMRC URI which looks like the following:

vmrc://clone:[TICKET]@[HOST]:[PORT]/?moid=[VM-MOREF]

where TICKET is obtained by calling the AcquireCloneTicket() method using the SessionManager in vCenter Server. The HOST will either be the Hostname/IP Address of vCenter Server and the PORT should be default to 443 and you will need to specify the VM MoRef ID. In the case of a standalone ESXi host, you would just change the HOST property. If you do not wish to use the clone ticket, you can also just provide the following URI which will prompt for your ESXi credentials

vmrc://@[HOST]:[PORT]/?moid=[VM-MOREF]

Once you have generated the VMRC URI, you MUST launch it through a web browser as that is how it is passed directly to the Standalone VMRC application. In my opinion, this is not ideal especially for customers who wish to automatically generate this as part of a VM provisioning workflow to their end users and not having to require a browser to launch the Standalone VMRC application. If you have some feedback on this, please do leave a comment.

In the mean time, a quick workaround is to use the "open" command on Mac OS X along with the VMRC URI which will automatically load it into your default browser and launch the Standalone VMRC application for you.

open 'vmrc://clone:cst-VCT-52e44ad7-712f-9f45-a9ee-13ec6a74acaf--tp-B1-6F-91-F6-B5-8F-80-E5-FD-D6-E1-8B-10-F7-FE-15-C5-2A-75-41@192.168.1.60:443/?moid=vm-18'

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

I am sure there are probably a few of you asking, what about for Linux users? Well, you can probably guess what is being worked on next 😉

Running Nested ESXi / VSAN Home Lab on Ravello

04.14.2015 by William Lam // 3 Comments

There are many options when it comes to building and running your own vSphere home lab. There are going to be different pros and cons to each of these solutions which you will need to evaluate things like cost, performance, maintenance, ease of use and complexity to name a few. Below is a list of the currently available options to you today.

[Read more...]

vCenter Host Gateway ... more than meets the eye

04.10.2015 by William Lam // 9 Comments

While going through the download motion like many of you when vSphere 6.0 was generally available, something that caught my eye in the vCenter Server download area was something called the vCenter Host Gateway (vCHG) virtual appliance. At first, I did not know what that was and until I spoke to a few colleagues did I realize that vCHG is the evolution of the Multi-Hypervisor Management (MHM) Plugin which provides vSphere Administrators a way to natively manage Hyper-V hosts within the vCenter Server UI. MHM was originally released as a Fling and later then productized within the vCenter Server product. At the time, it made sense for the plugin to be Windows based as it needed to connect to Hyper-V which obviously ran on Microsoft Windows.

It looks like the folks over in the MHM team have been quite busy as they have gotten rid of the Windows installer and have now provided a Virtual Appliance which uses winrm to directly communicate to the Hyper-V hosts. In addition, you can now manage Hyper-V hosts within the vSphere Web Client where as previously it was only available using the vSphere C# Client. vCHG works with both vCenter Server for Windows as well as the vCenter Server Appliance, there are no additional Windows host required for this new solution. Deploying and configuring vCHG is relatively straight forward and you can find all the instructions here. There were a few minor gotchas that I ran into and I thought it would be worth sharing, especially figuring out what was needed on the Hyper-V hosts which was mainly due to my lack of familiarity with winrm.

You have the option of configuring winrm to go over standard HTTP (port 5985) or HTTPS (port 5986) on the Hyper-V host but the latter requires you to setup SSL Certificates which you can find more details here. For that reason, I just went with the default HTTP method to quickly get going. To configure winrm, you will need to run following command and accept the default with "y":

winrm quickconfig

Next, you will need to enable winrm listener as shown in the screenshot below by running the following command:

winrm e winrm/config/listener

At this point, you can now login to your vSphere Web Client and to add a Hyper-V host, you will need to add at the vSphere Datacenter level. This was another thing that I missed and though could be added into its own vSphere Cluster. As you can see from the screenshot below, we have extended our "Add Host" workflow to natively support Hyper-V hosts, so that it is intuitive and familiar for our vSphere Administrators.

You will need to specify both the Hostname/IP Address of Hyper-V host followed by the winrm port (e.g. hostname:5985) and then select the Type to be "Hyper-V" and in a just a few seconds, you will be able to see your Hyper-V hosts within vCenter Server and perform basic power operations as well as creating/managing VMs running on Hyper-V. Below is a screenshot of my Hyper-V host and I just finished created a new VM using the vSphere Web Client and you can see it seamless integrated into a single view.

This is great enhancement for customers who have to run a mix workload between vSphere and Hyper-V (I do apologize to those in advance ;)) but at least you now truly now have a single integrated pane of glass to manage all your workloads. I also do want to stress the word "integrated" beyond just the UI component that vCHG provides. I have found that all the operations through the vSphere Web Client is also exposed through our rich vSphere API, for example the AddHost_Task() method now includes a new hostGateway spec. This also means you will be able to use all the existing power operations and create VMs methods against your Hyper-V hosts, again tightly integrated into the existing tools you are familiar with such as PowerCLI for example for Automation. How freaking cool is that!?

but wait ... there's more! 😀

While going through the exercise of deploying vCHG and adding Hyper-V host, I could not help but wonder why we named this feature "Host Gateway", especially since we only supported a single third party hypervisor, did not really make sense to me? Well, it turns out there is a lot more coming! When you select the "Type" from the drop down menu, I notice there were a few more options: KVM and vCloud Air!

I of course I tried to add a KVM host as well as my vCloud Air account but looks like those providers are not available just yet. I am actually quite excited to see support for vCloud Air. This has always been something I felt should have been available natively within the vSphere Inventory so that an administrator could deploy their workloads either locally on-premises or hosted on vCloud Air without having to jump around. It should align with the existing vSphere Administrator workflows and I am glad to see this change. This is definitely an area that I recommend keeping an eye out on and hopefully we will see vCloud Air support soon!