I wanted to test WSX, which is part of the Tech Preview of VMware Workstation for Linux. WSX allows you to see your virtual machine’s desktop in a browser window. I installed Workstation for Linux on my Ubuntu 12.04 desktop, the process is fairly straight forward. This is what I had to do to get WSX running:
- Download Workstation bundle
- Install Workstation
sudo chmod 755 VMware-Workstation-Full-e.x.p-646643.x86_64.bundle
sudo ./VMware-Workstation-Full-e.x.p-646643.x86_64.bundle - Open a terminal and do the following to install python 2.6
sudo apt-get install python2.6 - When python is installed you can run WSX Server
/etc/init.d/vmware-wsx-server start - Now you can open a browser session to “localhost:8888” or “<ip-address-of-VM>:8888”
- Login using your username/password
- Click on “Home” and then on “Configuration”
- Click “Add Server”
- I added my vCenter Server 5.0 Update 1
- Click the newly added server in the left pane
- Enter your vCenter Server credentials and click login
- Now you will see a list of VMs which you can access… (see screenshot below, this is what you will see in your browser window when you select a VM)
My next step was digging in to a lean install for WSX, but I should have known better… William Lam posted it around the time I started looking in to it. Thanks William :-). Again, I would recommend reading this article by the WSX developer. If you run in to any issues, you could always check /var/log/vmware/vmware-wsx-server-<pid>.log.
