A few months ago, Dimitar Barfonchovski created a blog post on accessing the VM Console via PowerCLI, hosted on the PowerCLI Blog. Over the next few days, some cool enhancements came out focusing on a GUI for the featureset – which appear to have been lost to the great bitbucket in the sky, or I’d give some credit to them (if you know what I’m talking about, drop a link in the comments and I’ll update the article). I added a few enhancements of my own and ended up with a quick a dirty pastebin that would allow anyone to authenticate to any vCenter server and get a list of VMs they have access to.

I finally went back and combined this with last Friday’s post on creating a PowerCLI module. With a few tweaks we end up with an auto-import module and the cmdlet Get-VMConsoles. Any user can run this cmdlet. Upon connection to the specified vCenter server, you are prompted for authentication. After successfully authenticating, click Open VM Consoles and you are presented with a list of consoles available to your user. You can add a few filters, as I have done below. Ctrl-click to select the VMs you want to view and hit OK in the bottom right. Your consoles will open in your system’s browser in separate tabs.

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