Connect to Serial Console RHV VM through SSH

Imagine that you have one or several VMs deployed on top of your RHV deployment, and you do not have SSH access configured (because it is a brand new VM without network config settings, or just because you have some issues and you do not have a direct SSH connection).

In this case, you must connect with a serial console, through for example the Remote Viewer, to configure or just to check if the VM is doing ok.

But sometimes, when you have a lot of latency between your source point of connection (like your laptop) and your destination VM through the serial console port, you must struggle to enter even one command.

To avoid this, you can connect through the serial console of any VM directly from the RHV Manager, directly with your terminal (without using Remote Viewer or similar).

Connect to the port 2222 of rhevm and use the user “ovirt-vmconsole”:

~ # ssh -p 2222 rhevm -l ovirt-vmconsole
Available Serial Consoles:
00 HostedEngine[10b4bd9c-d5e6-4663-b3e9-97a39f0b414c]
01 ceph0[700891dc-48d4-4951-981b-2298ad59ace9]
02 ceph1[774ff020-e1be-449b-982a-11c9de2a2d21]
03 ceph2[88a57a12-99cb-44ee-8998-6ad5b48dd21a]
...
08
cephpocnode1[aacf1c46-5a7d-44aa-b953-7cff00d390fb]‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍

NOTE: when connecting through port 2222, use the -l option instead of @, because it’s a serial port.

After that, you will be prompted with the whole list of VMs that are available in your cluster.

Select the VM that you want to connect:

SELECT> 8

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 7.5 (Maipo)
Kernel 3.10.0-862.3.2.el7.x86_64 on an x86_64

cephpocnode1 login: root
Password:
Last login: Tue Jul 31 09:17:21 on ttyS0
[root@cephpocnode1 ~]#‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍

And that’s it! You have a brand new serial console connection through ssh, without using other stuff than your favourite terminal console (and avoiding the latency of course).

NOTE: Opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect that of the company I work for.

Enjoy!