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
- Verify that the virtual machine is powered off.
- Check that you know the correct media types for the port to access, vSPC connections, and any conditions that might apply. See Using Serial Ports with vSphere Virtual Machines.
- To connect a serial port over a network, add a Firewall rule set. See Adding a Firewall Rule Set for Serial Port Network Connections.
- To use authentication parameter with network serial port connections, see Authentication Parameters for Virtual Serial Port Network Connections.
- Required privilege:
Procedure
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:23The virtual machine initiates the connection to your Linux system on port 23.