Updated for vSphere 8.0

VMware HTML Console SDK Release Notes

VMware HTML Console SDK 2.2.0 | 14 November 2022 | Zip on developer.vmware.com
For VMware vSphere and vCloud Director 8.0 | Last document update: 14 November 2022
Check back for additions and updates to these release notes.

Contents

About the HTML Console SDK
What's New in this Release
Quick Start
Compatibility Notices
Recently Resolved Issues
Known Issues and Workarounds

About the HTML Console SDK

The HTML Console SDK allows developers to add virtual machine console functionality to an existing web user interface running on vSphere. Using applications created by this SDK, end users can interact with a virtual machine console by typing on the keyboard and moving the mouse.

The HTML Console SDK provides APIs with the following functionality:

Mouse and keyboard input, including mouse scroll without VMware Tools
Send Ctrl + Alt + Delete
Full screen mode
Client and guest keyboards for Japanese, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese (pt_pt), French, Swiss-French, and Swiss-German.

What's New in this Release

This version follows vSphere 8.0 and is the first update since 2019. The programming guide contains new sample code showing how to copy from a remote virtual machine to the local HTML Console client.

The SDK is available in the Download section of the landing page. You might have to sign in using your VMware Customer Connect account. The SDK is delivered as a ZIP file. After you download and unzip the file, you use Javascript and CSS directly.

See compatibility notices below for browser and OS support.

Quick Start

To see how it works, place this HTML code in a folder with the unzipped SDK.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC"-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
 "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> 
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> 
<head> 
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>Console</title> 
</head> 
<body>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/wmks-all.css" /> 
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.8.3.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://code.jquery.com/ui/1.8.16/jquery-ui.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="wmks.min.js"></script> 
<div id="wmksContainer" style="position:absolute;width:100%;height:100%"></div> 
<script>
var wmks = WMKS.createWMKS("wmksContainer",{})
 .register(WMKS.CONST.Events.CONNECTION_STATE_CHANGE, function(event,data){
 if(data.state == WMKS.CONST.ConnectionState.CONNECTED){
  console.log("connection state change : connected");}
 });
wmks.connect("wss://ESXi.host.IP.Address:443/ticket/webmksTicket"); 
</script> 
</body>
</html>

Replace ESXi.host.IP.Address with the IP address or fully-qualified hostname of the ESXi host where the virtual machine resides.

To get the webmksTicket, find the vCenter Server that manages the above ESXi host. You can get a ticket using the vSphere API, or with the managed object browser:

In a browser go to https://vCenter.Server.IP.Address/mob
Provide your login credentials for [email protected] or another SSO account
Click content > rootFolder > Datacenter > vmFolder
Click the VM number of the virtual machine you want to connect to
Under Methods, click AcquireTicket
Type webmks in the value field and click Invoke Method
Copy and paste the ticket string to replace webmksTicket
Double-click the above HTML file to open it in your browser.

Once you know the managed object ID (moid) of the virtual machine, you can quickly get another ticket at this URL. Replace NN with the VM number:

https://vCenter.Server.IP.Address/mob/?moid=vm-NN&method=acquireTicket

Compatibility Notices

The HTML Console SDK was tested with recent versions of the following Web browsers on Windows, MacOS, and Linux:

Google Chrome
Mozilla Firefox
Apple Safari (MacOS only)
Microsoft Edge
Internet Explorer (Windows only)

Recently Resolved Issues

The HTML Console 2.1 release resolved the following issues.

HTML Console support for vCloud Director.
Version 9.x of vCloud Director (vCD) supports HTML Console 2.1 and the stand-alone VMware Remote Console (VMRC).
More international keyboard support.
The HTML Console 1.0 release supported only English and Japanese keyboards. Release 2.0 added support for German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese keyboards. This release also supports French, Swiss-French, and Swiss-German keyboards.
The css and img folders went too deep.
In the 2.0 release, style sheets in the css/css folder were not able to reference the touch-sprite images in the img/img folder. In this release all css/css style sheets and img/img images are at the correct folder level.

Known Issues and Workarounds

The following issues are found in the HTML Console 2.2 release.

Incomplete support for international keyboards.
In this release no other international keyboards are supported other than Japanese, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese (pt_pt), French, Swiss-French, and Swiss-German.