This was an interesting request that came up on the VMTN community forums asking whether it was possible to block users from accessing the vSphere HTML5 (H5) VM Console in vCenter Server and only allowing access to a VM console through the use of the Standalone VM Remote Console (VMRC) client? What is the use case for this you might ask, well it looks like VM screen resolution was getting change between the two clients and the administrator simply wanted to restrict access to the H5 VM Console and direct users to use only the VMRC Client.
At first, I could not see how this could be accomplished since all of their users already have the "Console interaction" privilege within vCenter Server which allows them to to interact with both VM Console interfaces. I was then reminded of an article that I wrote back in 2021 where a user wanted to restrict access to the vSphere UI interface while still allowing access to vCenter Server through the vSphere API, which used an access policy to restrict access based on a URI endpoint within the vCenter Server Tomcat application configuration.
This gave me an idea to experiment with and see if we could do the same and simply restrict the /ui/vmconsole endpoint which serves the H5 VM Console while still preserving VMRC access.
