VMWare vSphere 6.0 web client via SSH tunnel

Hi,

 I just found a way to connect to a remote vCenter server via SSH tunnel, using the web client.  This has been tested on vSphere 6.0, it may need some modifications to work on other version.

 Let's define some information for this example:
  • 192.168.x.x will be the IP address of the vSphere web client (vCenter)
  • x.x.x.x will be the IP address of the SSH server
  • localuser is the name of the user on the local machine (from which you execute the SSH command)
  • remoteuser is the name of the username on the (remote) SSH server
  • 5252 is the port on which the (remote) SSH server is listening

The first thing to do is to execute this shell command to open an SSH connection and create tunnels:

sudo ssh -i /home/localuser/.ssh/id_rsa -l remoteuser1 -L 443:192.168.x.x:443 -L 902:192.168.x.x:902 -L 903:192.168.x.x:903 -L 9443:192.168.x.x:9443 -p 5252 x.x.x.x

Please not that we must use sudo because we're using ports =< 1024. Also note the -i, specifying  the path to my private key. You won't need that if you're using password authentication.

The next step is to open a browser at https://localhost/vsphere-client/.

 You'll see that you'll be redirected to an URL that is not using localhost as the hostname. It will use the FQDN of your vCenter server.  What you need to do then is to set add this hostname to the 127.0.0.1 entry in your /etc/hosts file.

 The final step is to restart your browser and access https://localhost/vsphere-client/ and it should work, including the remote console (please note that Adobe Flash is required, and maybe the Client Integration Plugin.

Once you're done, I suggest that you undo your change to your /etc/hosts file to avoid any problem or confusion in the future.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

General linux performance troubleshooting

Here's a list of commands that you should execute and then share the output to someone who can help you figure out what resource is the bottleneck in your system. Note, it requires the  sysstat  and  procps  packages (ubuntu and RHEL and its derivatives): uptime vmstat 1 10 iostat -xN 2 10 mpstat -P ALL 3 10 pidstat 1 10 free -mw (or free -m, if your OS doesn't support -w)  uptime is to see the load averages on the system. vmstat is mostly used to tell if the system is swapping or not. If you see significant numbers in the 'si' and 'so' columns, your system is most likely swapping (using the hard drive as RAM), which usually slows performance a lot. iostat is mostly used to determine if your disk subsystem is not able to cope with the load. If you see one or more lines that shows 100 or close almost constantly, it is probably the case.  If it is your swap volume, you probably saw numbers in the 'si' and 'so' columns in the  vmsta
Read more

Asterisk works under OpenVZ (no zaptel)

Hi, Just to let you know that I did a basic test with asterisk on an OpenVZ VE and it works. We only tested SIP connectivity (it would probably be complex to have Zaptel support and I don't really need it). We were able to connect to a VoIP provider using SIP ( unlimitel ) and music on hold works. The only thing I had to change to make it work is to comment out this line in /usr/sbin/safe_asterisk: #TTY=9 # TTY (if you want one) for Asterisk to run on (I guess there is no TTY9 (console # 9) on openVZ since it is a virtual machine and TTY9 is usually a physical console (monitor)). I'll soon put my asterisk server in a VE, I'll let you know how it goes. I also use Unlimitel and ATAs to link my PSTN line and cordless phones.
Read more