Console and terminal
Reaching a guest's screen and shell from the browser.
Every VM has a graphical console in the console, proxied over a WebSocket. You do not need network access to the guest, or even a working guest network — the console attaches to the virtual display the same way a monitor would.
This is how you install an operating system, fix a guest that has lost its network, and see a boot that is failing.
Opening the console
Open the VM and choose Console. The guest’s screen appears. Keyboard and mouse go through.
The console works for any VM that is running, regardless of its network configuration. That is the point: a guest whose firewall you have just broken is still reachable here.
How access is authorized
The browser cannot hold your session credential on a raw WebSocket, so the console asks the API for a short-lived, single-use ticket and connects with that. The ticket is scoped to one VM and expires quickly.
Practically, this means console sessions cannot be shared by copying a URL, and a console left open does not become a standing door into the guest.
Opening a console is recorded in the audit log.
Attaching installation media
From the console screen you can attach an ISO from the ISO library and change it without stopping the VM — which is what a multi-disc installation or a driver disk needs.
You can also mount the guest tools ISO here, and eject it when the install is done.
Virtual USB
Files can be presented to a running guest as a USB mass-storage device — useful for getting a driver, a licence file or a configuration bundle into a VM that has no network yet. See Virtual USB.
The host terminal
Separately from a guest’s console, each host has a terminal on its detail screen in Infrastructure. That one opens the VS-HCI CLI on the server — not a Linux shell, and not the guest.
It is the same restriction SSH has, for the same reason: a browser tab that opened a root shell would walk straight past the authorization that root shell access exists to enforce. Sessions are audited when they open and when they close.
When the console does not open
| Symptom | Likely cause |
|---|---|
Console blank, VM RUNNING |
The guest is running but not drawing — check it actually booted |
| Console will not connect | The VM’s host is unreachable; check it in Infrastructure |
| Connects then drops | The ticket expired before the socket established — retry |
| No console option | The VM is not running |
If the VM is on a host that is OFFLINE, the console has nothing to attach to. Fix the host
first.