title: Disabling https redirect for VMware Server link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2009/12/28/disabling-https-redirect-for-vmware-server/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 204 created: 2009/12/28 22:21:14 created_gmt: 2009/12/28 22:21:14 comment_status: open post_name: disabling-https-redirect-for-vmware-server status: publish post_type: post

By default VMware Server 2 redirects any connection from a remote host to the admin service to the latter’s https port (usually 8333). This is a problem for two reasons: (1) VMware’s shipping SSL cert is bogus (or at least expired); and (2) The login prompt usually fails to display when connecting over https (which I’m going to guess is related to the fact that the certificate is bogus).

The suggested solution for (1) is to install your own valid certificate. This isn’t actually very hard. The only tip I would relay is to make sure your certificate key is blank since there’s no mechanism for supplying the service with a password during startup. This knowledge base article provides the details for a Windows host (which any Unix admin worth their salt should be able to adapt to other platforms).

None of the official recommendations for (2) are very helpful. Part of this is, I think, due to VMware’s unwillingness to accept how widespread the problem is.

In my work and home environments, at least, 10 times out of 10 a successful connection to the https URL for the server (e.g. https://mymachine.example.com:3333/ui) will result in a blank screen and no login prompt. A refresh will result in a connection error. Every time.

An obvious workaround would be to make the remote connection over http rather than https. Unfortunately you won’t find any evidence of how to do this in the official documentation or knowledge base. The lack of official information has led to some confusion in the VMware user community, as found in this thread where two different solutions are presented.

In my case the second solution proposed in the aforementioned thread worked just fine for me. This involved:

1 Stopping the server (/etc/init.d/vmware stop);

2. Editing /etc/vmware/hostd/proxy.xml to replace anything between the <accessMode> tags with the directive httpAndHttps;

3. Starting the server (/etc/init.d/vmware start).

At that point you should be able to connect remotely using http (e.g. http://myserver.example.com:8222/ui).

Copyright 2004-2019 Phil Lembo