Disallowing multiple vm console sessions
November 30, 2010 | VMware | 10 Comments

Currently I’m involved in a high-secure virtual infrastructure design and we are required to reduce the number of entry points to the virtual infrastructure. One of the requirements is to allow only a single session to the virtual machine console. Due to the increasing awareness \ demand of security in virtual infrastructure more organizations might want to apply this security setting.

1. Turn of the virtual machine.
2. Open Configuration parameters of the VM to edit the advanced configuration settings
3. Add Remote.Display.maxConnections with a value of 1
4. Power on virtual machine

Update: Arne Fokkema created a Power-CLI function to automate configuring this setting throughout your virtual infrastructure. You can find the power-cli function on ICT-freak.nl.

10 responses to “Disallowing multiple vm console sessions”

  1. Ray says:
    November 30th, 2010 at 16:43

    Why not setting it to “0″ and dictate that remote connections are only allowed through RDP?

  2. Jason Boche says:
    November 30th, 2010 at 16:45

    You might like this too http://www.boche.net/blog/index.php/2010/06/23/disable-copy-and-paste-for-a-vm/

  3. Hugo Strydom says:
    November 30th, 2010 at 19:28

    @Jason

    This is by default in v4.1 disabled. You can look at KB : 1026437. Thus no need to specify it anymore.

  4. Elvedin Trnjanin says:
    November 30th, 2010 at 19:49

    Additional security information can be found in the “VMware vSphere 4.0 Security Hardening Guide” ( http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/10109 ) and should be a good read for everyone

  5. Greg says:
    November 30th, 2010 at 21:26

    So the obvious question is how do I enabled this for each VM, a cluster, dc etc. Looks like Arne Fokkema is frist watch tonight http://ict-freak.nl/2010/11/30/powercli-re-disallowing-multiple-vm-console-sessions/ – nice work all

  6. LucD says:
    November 30th, 2010 at 21:42

    My Security – Hardening – Part 1 – Virtual Machines post shows one way to apply these recommendations.

  7. Alastair Cooke says:
    February 3rd, 2011 at 22:44

    Hi Frank,

    First off great blog, I always have to set aside some time to re-read your longer posts to get and understand all the information.

    A correction for this post, the advanced setting is “RemoteDisplay.maxConnections”
    You have a dot between Remote and Display which doesn’t work on my 4.1 environment and might cause me issues when I redo my VCAP-DCA exam.

  8. Drew says:
    January 19th, 2012 at 20:17

    is there a way to kick a user out of a console session if he has left it open?

  9. Trackbacks says:
    May 21st, 2012 at 17:22

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