#vsphere client

Before I get into showing you how to get the vSphere web client to work, I need to give a quick back story. If you’re not interested in this, jump down a few paragraphs to “The Problem”. 

I work in a place that uses a heavy amount of VMware. Because of this, I have to be able to login to a client and manage the virtual machines that my team owns. This is fine, assuming you are running Windows or OS X, but not so fine when under Linux. I don’t use Windows at work (or try not to) and just a few months ago, all machines at my desk are now Fedora Linux.

So I knew ahead of time of the web client stopped working because Google did the right thing and disabled NPAPI for good on Linux. This basically made the vSphere Client Integration Plugin useless to me. I ran into this before and was aware that Flash is no longer supported on the Linux platform. Sure it gets security updates once in a while, but it’s stuck on an extremely low version. So low in fact, that my company’s web client asks for at least 11.5 of flash. 

So, I did manage to get vSphere Web to work in Firefox, combination of the plugin, pepper flash and fresh player plugin. However, I ran into one issue. 

This error is annoying. Windows and OS X have this binary packaged with the plugin and yet, here’s the Linux version, clearly missing these binaries. Why? VMware support, who I would think would try to test my method internally, decided to tell me ‘no’ without trying to give any hints on where I could obtain the binaries for Linux. Basically they dodged my question. You don’t tell or do that to a Linux admin. Ever. 

Also, shout out to the VMware support rep and engineers for caring about their customer base. It’s clear you guys really do care about your customers and the communities.

The Problem:

Google disabled NPAPI fully on Chrome for Linux (this is a good thing, regardless)

VMware decided to stay in the dark ages for a while and their 6.0 client is using PPAPI to an extent. So they finally caught up. (Still needs flash)

Adobe no longer updates Flash aside from security updates (this is a good thing because Flash needs to die). 

VMware support decided to not give me any hints or ideas where to obtain “vmware-authd”

Prerequisites: 

Fedora 22 or higher, 64 bit (tested with F23 also)

Firefox browser (chrome or chromium not supported)

vCenter/vSphere 5.5 or above (6.0 also applies)

Third-party RPM’s (links will follow)

Understanding that this is sort of a hack

1. First thing is first, you need a couple of RPM’s. You need freshplayerplugin and chromium-pepper-flash (flash that comes with Chrome). Links below: Chromium Pepper Flash: http://koji.russianfedora.pro/koji/packageinfo?packageID=110  Fresh Player Plugin: http://koji.russianfedora.pro/koji/packageinfo?packageID=134 Make sure to install them... # dnf install *.rpm I’m unsure of any repo that handles these. I have my own and update them occasionally. 2. Ensure that firefox see’s the plugin in the ‘add ons’ (click your menu icon on the top right and click the add ons button). Set it to Ask to Activate.

3. Go to a vSphere Web Console in your environment. 

4. The bottom will usually state to download the Client plugin. Click the link and download the “bundle” file.

5. Install the bundle file. You’ll need to elevate to root to do so. You can also use sudo. 

[nazu@diurne 05:46 PM ~]$ su - [root@diurne 05:47 PM ~]# cd /home/nazu/Downloads/ [root@diurne 05:47 PM ~]# chmod +x *.bundle [root@diurne 05:47 PM Downloads]# ./VMware-ClientIntegrationPlugin-5.5.0.x86_64.bundle

6. Optional: This is only needed if you face an error “invalid username/password” -- Create a file called /etc/vmware/config and place the following in it: 

vmauthd.server.alwaysProxy = "TRUE"

Note: Steps 7-9 is needed for versions lower than 6.0 -- 6.0 should not require this. If you see the vmware-authd error, then proceed with these steps.

7. Download vmware player for linux here

8. Instead of installing it, extract it instead. This will take a few moments for the prompt to come back.

# chmod +x VMware-Player-12.0.0-2985596.x86_64.bundle # ./VMware-Player-12.0.0-2985596.x86_64.bundle -x /root/vm Extracting VMware Installer...done.

9. Copy the binaries and set their permissions. Note: We use SUID because otherwise, the console will still fail to load with one of a few cryptic errors.

# cp ~/vm/vmware-vmx/sbin/vmware-authd* /usr/sbin/ # chmod ugo+x /usr/sbin/vmware-authd* # chmod u+s /usr/sbin/vmware-authd

10. Next, tell SELinux to stop whining (This usually sufficies, you can use audit2why < /var/log/audit/audit.log later if you still have issues/errors)

# setsebool mozilla_plugin_can_network_connect 1

11. Close firefox completely (if it’s not already) and reopen it. Check your plugins.

12. Go back to vSphere and attempt to login. If you see pop-ups to allow the plugins, make sure to set them to allow and refresh the page.

So far so good.

The bad part (yes, there is a bad part):  Pepper flash is not “sandboxed” like most other plugins you would install and use in firefox (due to the wrapper), so it’s sort of a security concern there. Recently, firefox has done the right thing and disabled flash by default. However, because firefox doesn’t know (or recognize) pepperflash actually is flash, my recommendation is to set flash to “Ask to activate” (as noted in Step 2). Otherwise it will just keep activating itself. I’m not a fan of that obviously. I’d prefer to say “never activate”, but unfortunately there are some sites I still need to use flash.

I also had a chance to try this with a 6.0 vCenter/vSphere. Works as intended without issues (and the remote console looks and feels much better). Also, it’s using PPAPI. However, it still needs flash because VMware is working on a VMRC client for Linux™ circa April 17, 2015. I foresee an actual client sometime in 2020.

Recently I received a question about the Performance tab within vCenter which intrested me. Looking at the available Chart Options we can see that there are two distinctive performance streams: Real-time data Historical data Real-time Data  The Real-time data is displayed for the last hour only and is directly queried from the ESX Host (vpxa) [&]

Real-time Chart は20秒毎のチャート。

Download vSphere Client from the vSphere Server:

http://{your-server-ip}