VMWare infrastructure web access, hyperlinks between vmware servers

Question

We are using multiple vmware servers, that each host several vmware images/instances. Each department uses its own vmware server. The vmware instances are always accessed through the "VMWare infrastructure web access" web page from the console tab panel. The vmware servers are plain windows servers (nothing fancy).

Now it turns out that some of these vmware images are useful for multiple departments. Of course we considered to copy these images, distributing them to all vmware servers, hosting the same image multiple times.

But we would in fact prefer to only host 1 copy of each instance. But still we would like to have all images accessible from 1 web page. Merging them to 1 server is of course impossible (performance-wise).

So, this got me wondering, perhaps there is a way to create hyperlinks within the vmware web access portal to vmware instances that are actually hosted on a different server. They would appear to be all on the same server but in fact they are distributed.

Does such thing exist, and how should it be configured ?

Answer 1

In mean time I found a reasonable solution for my problem. The vmware-vmrc.exe can be called from the commandline with several parameters. For example with following parameters it will open the vmware session immediately without the need of specifying any credentials.

vmware-vmrc.exe -X -h hostname:8333 -u "username" -p "password" "[standard] ... .vmx"

Important: The "[standard] ... .vmx" value is not just a file name.

• To know this value, you need to visit the webpage of your vmware (e.g. https:// hostname:8333/ui/).
• Next click the button "Configure VM" which will open a tab panel with configuration settings.
• There you will find a setting called "Virtual Machine Configuration File". It often starts with the string "[standard]".

Next, it was really easy to write a little batch file that allows me to pick the desired vmware from a menu.