getting-vmware-remote-console-plugin-working

Having lost my old setup where I had the VMWare Remote Console plugin to connect to vCloud Director 1.5 working, I went through the pain of figuring out how I got it working last time again and thought I best make a note so I don't spend hours searching Google again!

We use a iLand at work for virtual machines in the cloud and in order to setup new machines, we often require console access to the Virtual Machines deployed up there. In theory this should be as simple as downloading and running the VMRC plugin, rebooting browser and off you go. However I found trying to get it working in Firefox such a pain that I had to resort to IE, even that wasn't easy.

First things first, make sure if you've got VMWare vSphere client installed on your machine get rid of that before starting, there seems to be a conflict between that and VMRC plugin. Next, when you visit the web console for your vCloud Director instance make sure you add that website to the "Compatibility View" within IE, this will prompt you to run/install the plugin.

Click the console of one of your VMs to try and get console access, you'll get prompted to download/install the VMRC plugin, follow through the steps and restart your browser. Now login again to vCloud Director and try and open the console session for a VM, you'll find you're stuck with "Connecting..." at the top. I found the only way to fix this was to add my vCloud Director address as a Trusted Site, did this and refreshed the page and I was up and running!

If you're giving this a go, good luck and I hope this helps. It worked for me on Windows 7 x64 running Internet Explorer 11 - worth noting that from what I've read, it doesn't work at all on Windows 8..