Opening a Virtual Machine Console Session

Open a virtual machine (VM) console session to display the console of the guest operating system running in the VM.

The following procedure describes how to open a VM console session in the ztC Edge Console, but you can also use a remote desktop application for this purpose.

To open a VM console session

  1. On the Virtual Machines page, select a VM.
  2. Ensure that the VM is in a running state.

  3. Click Console () in the bottom panel.

    Note:

    After you click Console, the console session that opens may be blank if the browser has an HTTPS connection to the system, but does not have a security exception for it. In this situation, click the IP address in the upper-right corner of the session window. This IP address, which is in the format https://system_IP_address:8000, adds the system IP address as a security exception site in the browser. A security exception allows the browser to open the site.

    Depending on the browser, additional security windows or messages may appear. With some browsers, one or more security messages appear, and you need to click through those messages. With other browsers, the address bar turns red with no message, and you need to click the address to proceed. Some specific examples are:

    • If Certificate error appears in the address bar, you may need to (1) click the address; (2) on a page displaying The website cannot display the page, click More information; and then (3) on a page displaying This site is not secure, click Go on to the webpage (not recommended).
    • If the page Warning: Potential Security Risk Ahead appears, click Advanced and in the next window, click Accept Risk and Continue.
    • If Error response with Error code 405 appears, close the window or tab.

    This security exception will then apply to all VMs. You need to perform these actions only once for each browser. When you click Console in the future, the console session to the VM opens successfully.

After you have opened the VM console session, you can resize the browser window and the VM console session. You can also use keyboard shortcuts.

  1. Open the VM console session (see procedure above).

    Icons appear at the left edge of the window. To display the icons, you may need to click the arrow in the tab at the left edge of the window.

  2. To resize the browser window to full screen, click the full-screen icon ().

    When in full screen, click the full-screen icon () again to resize the browser to a smaller window.

  3. To resize the VM session inside the browser, click the Settings icon () and select a Scaling Mode (click the current mode to view a pull-down menu with other settings):

    • Remote Resizing (the default)—The size of the VM session changes when you change the resolution of the guest OS.
    • Local Scaling—The size of the VM session changes automatically to fill the full screen with the original width and height ratio.

  1. Open the VM console session (see procedure above).

    Icons appear at the left edge of the window. To display the icons, you may need to click the arrow in the tab at the left edge of the window.

  2. Click the A icon () at the left edge of the window to display the keyboard shortcut-selection icons.

  3. The following icons appear:

    • —Click for the Ctrl-key function.
    • —Click for the Alt-key function.
    • —Click for the Tab-key function.
    • —Click for the Esc-key function.
    • —Click for the Ctrl+Alt+Delete-keys function.

To resolve an issue where the VM console window does not open

Ask your network administrator to open ports 6900-6999 (inclusive).

To resolve an issue where the VM console window is blank

Verify that the VM is powered on and not in the process of booting. Also, click in the console window and press any key to deactivate the screen saver.

To resolve an issue where more than one VM console window is displayed and they are behaving erratically

Close all console windows and open only one console window.

To resolve an issue where the VM console window hangs on the ztC Edge system

For Ubuntu-based VMs, the VM console hangs in the ztC Edge Console if you do not properly set the gfxmode parameter. In the guest operating system, edit the /boot/grub/grub.cfg file and change the gfxmode parameter to text (for example, set gfxmode=text).

If the console hangs before you can set the parameter, do the following:

  1. Restart the VM in the ztC Edge Console.
  2. At the GRUB menu, press e to edit the grub command.

  3. On the next screen, on the gfxmode line, change $linux_gfx_mode to text so the line reads:

    gfxmode text
  4. Press Ctrl-x or F10 to boot the guest operating system.

  5. To update the setting so it persists for each boot cycle, edit the /boot/grub/grub.cfg file and change the gfxmode parameter to text so the line reads:

    set gfxmode=text
  6. Save the /boot/grub/grub.cfg file.

To change the terminal type in a Linux-based VM if the console screen is unreadable

By default, the Linux operating system sets the TERM variable to vt100-nav, which is not properly supported by the vncterm program, the basis for the VM console in ztC Edge Console. If you use anything other than the command line, the screen becomes unreadable. To resolve this issue, change the terminal type in the Linux guest operating system:

  1. Open the inittab file in the guest operating system.
  2. In the following line, replace vt100-nav with vt100 by deleting -nav at the end of the line. The updated line appears as follows:

    # Run gettys in standard runlevels co:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty xvc0 9600 vt100

  3. Save the inittab file.

Related Topics

Starting a Virtual Machine

Shutting Down a Virtual Machine

Managing the Operation of a Virtual Machine