Man, if you find a solution to this, let the rest of us know. The closest thing I have come to a solution is to keep a big old c-clamp on my desk so I can mount my iphone on something and use the knfb reader app to read the screen. I actually did rescue a virtual machine that way once. It was just saying to press F3 to continue. If it had been anything more complicated, I don't know if it would have worked. On 02/04/2016 04:40 PM, Phil Rigby wrote:

Hi,

This is my first posting to this list and I'm hoping one or more of you can be of help.

I work for an IT services company as a Unix systems specialist. Over the last few years more and more of the system builds I am being asked to do have moved from physical servers to VMs. Our company's virtualisation provider of choice is the ESX platform running VMWare. I am trying to find out if there is any way I can get input access to the console of a VM guest. I realise there are many methods for installing and configuring the OS in an unattended manner using kikstart and other such tools but the problem comes when a VM guest running Linux has a problem and cannot complete an orderly boot up. In the days of physical servers, I could ssh to the ILO and, with the console output configured to be sent to the serial port device, I could read what was on the console, diagnose the issue and make corrections via input to the console to get the VM guest to boot up successfully. However, with a VM guest, I can't work out any way of being able to interact with the VM guest's console. I know that one can configure a virtual serial port to be used by the VM guest which will direct console access to a file that can be read on the ESX host machine but this is only half the job. I have no way of actually typing commands into the console during a live boot up.

For background, I am a totally blind user of JAWS and use Reflections for my terminal emulation software to communicate with any Linux OS that has a network configured on it or, if the machine is physical, I can, as stated earlier, get a session going with the ILO.

I just don't know what to do in the case of a VM. Sighted colleagues can of course just use vCenter's vSphere to get to a graphical version of the console for any VM guest but this is inaccessible with JAWS. I've even tried using the JAWS OCRfeature but this isn't accurate enough and doesn't allow positioning of the cursor precisely where I want it.

Have any of you faced this issue and found a way to work round it?

Regards,

Phil.

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Hi, Has anyone tried using serial port redirection on the enterprise version of ESX to a virtual serial port console appliance? http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1022303 I tried getting this working but as I don't have access to an enterprise version of ESX I couldn't do much with it. Andrew. -----Original Message----- From: Blind-sysadmins [mailto:blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of Phil Rigby Sent: 04 February 2016 22:41 To: blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org Subject: [Blind-sysadmins] Access to consoles of VMWare VM guests Hi, This is my first posting to this list and I'm hoping one or more of you can be of help. I work for an IT services company as a Unix systems specialist. Over the last few years more and more of the system builds I am being asked to do have moved from physical servers to VMs. Our company's virtualisation provider of choice is the ESX platform running VMWare. I am trying to find out if there is any way I can get input access to the console of a VM guest. I realise there are many methods for installing and configuring the OS in an unattended manner using kikstart and other such tools but the problem comes when a VM guest running Linux has a problem and cannot complete an orderly boot up. In the days of physical servers, I could ssh to the ILO and, with the console output configured to be sent to the serial port device, I could read what was on the console, diagnose the issue and make corrections via input to the console to get the VM guest to boot up successfully. However, with a VM guest, I can't work out any way of being able to interact with the VM guest's console. I know that one can configure a virtual serial port to be used by the VM guest which will direct console access to a file that can be read on the ESX host machine but this is only half the job. I have no way of actually typing commands into the console during a live boot up. For background, I am a totally blind user of JAWS and use Reflections for my terminal emulation software to communicate with any Linux OS that has a network configured on it or, if the machine is physical, I can, as stated earlier, get a session going with the ILO. I just don't know what to do in the case of a VM. Sighted colleagues can of course just use vCenter's vSphere to get to a graphical version of the console for any VM guest but this is inaccessible with JAWS. I've even tried using the JAWS OCRfeature but this isn't accurate enough and doesn't allow positioning of the cursor precisely where I want it. Have any of you faced this issue and found a way to work round it? Regards, Phil. _______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org https://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/listinfo/blind-sysadmins