You can connect the virtual serial port to a physical serial port or to a file on the host computer. You can also use a host-side named pipe to set up a direct connection between two virtual machines or a connection between a virtual machine and an application on the host computer. In addition, you can use a port or vSPC URI to connect a serial port over the network. A virtual machine can use up to 32 serial ports.

Important: With virtual hardware version 11 and later, if you configure a virtual machine without serial ports, they are entirely removed from the virtual chipset and they are not visible to the virtual machine OS.

Prerequisites

Procedure

  1. Right-click a virtual machine in the inventory and select Edit Settings.
  2. On the Virtual Hardware tab, click the Add New Device button.
  3. Select Serial Port from the drop-down menu.
    The new serial port appears at the bottom of the device list.
  4. From the New Serial port drop-down menu, select a connection type.
    Option Action
    Use output file Select this option to send output from the virtual serial port to a file on the host computer. To select an output file to connect to the serial port, click Browse .
    Use physical serial port Select this option to have the virtual machine use a physical serial port on the host computer. Select the serial port from the drop-down menu.
    Use named pipe Select this option to set a direct connection between two virtual machines or a connection between a virtual machine and an application on the host computer.
    1. Enter a name for the pipe in the Pipe Name field.
    2. Select the Near end and Far end of the pipe from the drop-down menus.
    Use Network To connect through a remote network, select Use network.
    1. Select the network backing.
      • To have the virtual machine monitor incoming connections from other hosts, select Server.
      • To have the virtual machine initiate a connection to another host, select Client.
    2. Enter a Port URI.

      The URI is the remote end of the serial port to which the virtual machine's serial port should connect.

    3. If vSPC is used as an intermediate step to access all virtual machines through a single IP address, select Use Virtual Serial Port Concentrator and enter the vSPC URI location.
  5. (Optional) Select Yield CPU on poll.
    Select this option only for guest operating systems that use serial ports in polled mode. This option prevents the guest from consuming excessive CPUs.
  6. Click OK.

Example: Establishing Serial Port Network Connections to a Client or Server Without Authentication Parameters

If you do not use vSPC and you configure your virtual machine with a serial port connected as a server with a telnet://:12345 URI, you can connect to your virtual machine's serial port from your Linux or Windows operating system.
telnet yourESXiServerIPAddress 12345
Similarly, if you run the Telnet Server on your Linux system on port 23 ( telnet://yourLinuxBox:23), you configure the virtual machine as a client URI.
telnet://yourLinuxBox:23
The virtual machine initiates the connection to your Linux system on port 23.