vmware: access the serial console of your vm'ed appliance

VMware is a great tool to demo/test appliances, but what about the serial console ? You can have VMware redirect the datastream of an emulated serial port to a named pipe on the host OS. This named pipe can be redirected to a socket. This way you convert the serial data stream to an tcp/ip stream. This makes you able to use a regular telnet program to interface with the serial console of your vm'ed appliance.

In linux you can use socat(http://www.dest-unreach.org/socat/ - in debian you can do an apt-get install socat ;) to redirect this named pipe to a socket. In Windows there exists a tool: Named Pipe TCP Proxy Utility (http://shvechkov.tripod.com/nptp.html). Basically what you do is (the example below is done in linux (debian) but for windows the procedure is somehow the same):

1. You create a serial port in your vmware configuration with the following settings:
   
   - Use named pipe
   - This is the server
   - The other end is an application.
   
   You specify the location of your named pipe, for example: /tmp/vm-serial0
   
   
   
   
   
   
2. Fire up your appliance.
3. You'll see the /tmp/vm-serial0 named pipe created in the host OS.
   
4. Use socat to set up the socket listener :
   
   socat -d -d -d /tmp/serial0 tcp-listen:9998
   
   A listening socket will be created at localhost on port 9998. The -d parameters gives verbose logging.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
5. Open a new terminal and do a telnet to localhost on port 9998:
   
   telnet localhost 9998
6. You're connected to the serial console of your vm'ed appliance.