How To Access Guest Console In OVM 3 Using VNC Without Using OVM Manager

Earlier releases of OVM (2.x) documented manual configuration to enable access to virtual machine consoles through VNC without using the OVM 2.x manager:

E.3 Guest Console Access

However, such configuration is not possible with Oracle VM 3.

With OVM3 this is achieved by redirecting the remote port to a local port using the ssh(1) command.

To do this, first find the id of the vm (this can be done in the Manager UI by expanding the entry for the vm, or using the "list vm" command in the CLI).

Then on the OVM Server ("ovs", aka "dom0") the vm is running on, issue the xm list command to find its ID, e.g.:

# xm list

Name                             ID Mem VCPUs State  Time(s)
0004fb00000600005454e1ab286913be 2  4096    2 -b---- 424.6
Domain-0                         0  840     8 r----- 478278.2

In this example the ID is 2.

Then find the port the vm console is listening on:

# xm list -l 2 | grep 59
(uuid 3c787270-abad-9595-8258-d27f03fd928d)
(location 127.0.0.1:5900)

In this example the vnc port for the vm is 5900.

On the system where you wish to display the console, open an ssh session to the ovm server and redirect the port to it, e.g.:

$ ssh -L 12345:localhost:5900 root@olvm-ovs00009

The "5900" port on the ovs will be redirected to port "12345" of your local desktop.

Leave this session open for the duration of the vnc session.

Then vncviewer can be used to open the vm console, e.g. from another terminal issue:

$ vncviewer localhost:12345

 On a Windows system, you can use some other SSH client, e.g. PuTTY for the re-direct.