Open a console to a virtual guest on ESXi or vSphere cluster

This entry ties in nicely with a previous entry I made about creating SSH tunnels for vSphere.

Unfortunately, when you setup SSH tunnels for the Windows vSphere client (or even for the vSphere web client), you cannot open console windows to the guests using the normal methods -- they will always fail to connect.

To workaround this, use VMware's "Remote Console" program to connect through the tunnel to the host. Note that the tunnel must go to the host on which the guest is running.

Steps:

1. Install VMware Remote Console (in Vmware downloads, vsphere 5.5, "Drivers & Tools" tab)
2. find out the VMID of the desired guest using the ESXi cmd line:
   

       vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms

3. open url (assuming host tunnel is 127.0.0.4):
   

      vmrc://root@127.0.0.4/?moid=vmid

   where vmid is the id you found; e.g. if the ID is 29:

      vmrc://root@127.0.0.4/?moid=29

In case it is not obvious, you open the URL from the command prompt:

cd C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Remote Console
vmrc.exe vmrc://root@127.0.0.4/?moid=29