Tuesday, June 02, 2009

HOWTO Access a VMWare console from Mac OS X or Linux

Problem

There are no VMWare Server clients for Linux and Mac OS X. VMWare provides a Web UI for its server, but it requires a plug-in that doesn't work* on non-Windows platforms.

Solution
  1. SSH into the VMWare Server.
  2. Navigate to the VM folder, and edit the *.vmx file.
  3. Enable VNC by appending the following settings:
    remotedisplay.vnc.enabled = "TRUE"
    remotedisplay.vnc.port = "5900"
    remotedisplay.vnc.password = "foobar"
  4. Start/restart your VM.
  5. Connect to your VM using a VNC client. I'm currently using Chicken of the VNC. You might want to google for a client that suits you.
If you need to connect to multiple VMs, simply use a different port (5900 for display :0, 5901 for diplay :1, etc).

I haven't tried this with VMWare ESX Server. I'll try this in the office tomorrow.

* It somewhat works in Linux.

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