VMware VMC analog?

bigdweeb

Re: Is there something like VMRC (VMware Remote Console) for XCP-ng?

I found this old topic that sort of matches what I'm looking for but I don't know if its quite what I'm looking for.

I have several XCP-ng servers setup and they're being managed through XOA. All this is working properly. Nearly all of my VMs are just handling a workload of sorts that I either ssh into or connect to via the web just as you'd expect for any normal server.

I have an edge case that I also need to solve for. In a couple cases I have a VM running in an isolated network for testing purposes. The host is in a network that I can route to, but the guest is intentionally not and adding routing to allow direct connections is either not possible or would invalidate what I'm trying to test. Right now, the only way I can figure out how to manage these instances is through the XOA web console. This works, but with ESXi I could either do this or have a direct link to the VM through the VMRC client that I could use. It was a nice feature to have because I could put that URI into a wiki and click on it to launch the client and reach the VM.

Is there any way of replicating that functionality with XCP-ng through a VNC session? I'd assume my VNC client would have to point to the host where the VM is running on a certain port and the host would have to know to present the virtual console through to it.

olivierlambert

You can use XO Proxies to not expose any host from this network, and access consoles remotely from the main XOA via those proxies
XO Lite will be bundled in each XCP-ng, so you can use it instead of XO for some specific use cases

bigdweeb

My particular setup may be a bit weird but here's a better description. I have my primary pool of servers running at home, and XOA runs there. I have a site-to-site VPN between home and the remote location so I can reach the remote host which is also managed through my XOA instance through the VPN tunnel. I don't need any proxies for this to work because I setup a VPN tunnel and XOA and the remote host have direct IP connectivity.

On the remote host, I have a VM that runs in an isolated network not reachable from home, so I cannot connect directly to the guest with VNC. If I'm connected to my home network I can see this guest through XOA. If however I connect to the VPN service at the remote end (different than the site-to-site tunnel) to get access to normal resources on the remote end and also want to use my test VM it becomes difficult to reach the VM because I can't reach my XOA instance back at home easily.

I'm not sure a proxy would solve this. I followed the instructions to test XO Lite and that looks like it is sort of what I am looking for. When I log into my remote host I can see the dashboard and the list of guests, but I don't see the console for the guests. Is the console supposed to be present or is the plan for it to be exposed in the future? If so, that would solve my problem.