Slackware / VMware --- bridging the gap
 

Simple question with possibly difficult roadmap to solution:


How to get slackware to connect to a vSphere 5.5 and have console access
(I connect from home, to a VM at my company office through VPN)


I tried so far:

1.To possibly install/build virtualbox and try to use that to connect to vmware....Build fails with generic makefile errors, while pkgs.org slackonly repo is unavailable

2. Run vSphere for Win through wine --- it works only up to a point where I need to open the remote console, where it says that it lost the connection and can't reconnect

3. vEMan --- https://sourceforge.net/projects/veman/
Ran it, but it fails since I don't have "yad" (although SF says I don't have to have any extra deps)
I'm not even sure that either one of these three will work


Open to suggestions, wild ideas and strokes of both stupid and genius

Slackware / VMware --- bridging the gap
 

upgrade your server to v6.5, install chrome on your Slackware machine and use the web interface.

rkelsen's suggestion might not be entirely helpful if you don't have the ability to affect that ESX update on the other side. I can confirm he is correct in that the web interface works fine on 6.5 from a basic Slackware install. Firefox or Seamonkey will both open console connections to hosts without issue.

As far as console access to 5.5 goes. My suggestions would be to ask for a Windows VM you can connect to with RDP and run the client there. This will perform better over the wire anyway.

The 5.5 stuff is quite old and I am not sure its worth the rabbit hole of trying to get it work. However you might have a look here, at some of the things folks did to get it running on wine (an old version at that). It looks like the net result is a everything but the console works, which is consistent with your experiences but in some of the posts below , it appears people might have got further. Most of that stuff should apply to white on Slackware as much as any other platform so it might be some things you can try.

https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManag...estingId=98354

I mean, one might infer that this person has the requisite level of access by the fact the they're asking the question... If not, then yes my suggestion is rather useless.

I've successfully run upgrades of ESXi before. If you have physical access to the box running the hypervisor, upgrading is a trivial exercise. Your existing VMs will still work, although you'll need to update VMware Tools on each of them.
I get UI glitches in Firefox... Nothing major, and easily worked around, but IME it's a "smoother" experience in Chrome.

I wouldn't be specifying the vSphere client version if that were the case, now would I?


My fix is precisely this, but I need a more permanent solution in the long run.

How viable would it be to run a Win7 or Win10 virtualized for this purpose?

You can install qemu on Salckware either from slackbuilds.org or Alien Bob has fairly recent packages that will probably work on current. You can install spice, qxl and all the fancy stuff but you probably don't need it. You can do a really basic build with the gtk and sdl interfaces. The work fine for getting a windows VM installed and going and than I just RDP to that.

So yes you can run windows 10 VM locally on qemu with KVM acceleration just fine. Some other directional pointers. rc.inet1 supports creating bridges on boot up, and assign an ip to it. Make yourself a little /30 network for the host an the windows vm. Than just fallow any of the basic iptables + nat tutorials out there to get the windows VM out there. You could of course bridge the windows VM out directly, as well; but that might be less plug and play depending on the rest of your network setup.

My apologies.
From memory (been a while since I used 5.5) it will allow you to set up a W10 VM. That's probably the best solution. I'd set it up on the host rather than your local machine, provided it has the resources, because it'll be faster.

If you'd rather have it on your local machine, then VirtualBox works very well in Slackware. In the past I used it for exactly this purpose, albeit with a Win8 guest. I've also used that setup for P2V conversions with good results.

End of the road
 

The situation is this> the company admin says he won't be upgrading any time soon from 5.5
(saying it's more hardware-related than anything else)
but he acknowledged and approved that I use one of our experimental dev VMs at the office to connect there via RDP and run vSphere there (when neccessary).
From one point, it's more complex since I'm connecting via RDP to one machine,
then through vSphere to another, and then finally to the client,
but this way it's more stable //vSphere runs natively, and that connection is faster and more reliable, since the first two machines (RDP target and vSphere target) are in LAN.

Since I recently got a brand-new laptop to use with 20gb RAM, and running Slackware, I will consider setting up a VM of my own so as not to depend on just that one company VM.

Marking the thread as solved

Thanks!

Fairly standard in a virtualised environment.

I'm often forgetting where I am, so I do things like give each machine a descriptive name or distinctive desktop background colour.

It's not unusual to log out of 2 or 3 machines (in series) at the end of a working day.