VMWare Server 2.0 – Disable HTTP(S) redirect

Posted by zo0ok on 2011/03/24 Leave a comment (0) Go to comments

Plenty of people have good reasons to want to access their VMWare Server 2.0.2 using http (port 8222) rather than https (port 8333). But VMWare did not make that so easy.

Many sites tell you that you enable http (disable http->https redirect) by editing /etc/vmware/hostd/proxy.xml

Replace (in all 5 places)
  <accessMode>????</accessMode>
with
  <accessMode>httpAndHttps</accessMode>

After that you should restart vmware.
  $ sudo /etc/init.d/vmware restart

This is absolutely correct, but perhaps it is just 90% of the solution.

If it does not help, try re-running vmware-config.pl:

  $ sudo /usr/local/bin/vmware-config.pl

When I did that, it asked me if I wanted to keep or replace my proxy.xml file (that I modified as suggested above). I choose to keep it, and after that http worked properly. It did many other things too… It seems overkill to recompile the kernel modules just to be able to disable http->https redirect. Maybe there is a smarter way, but at least this one worked.

If you are fine with the command line, and you want a simple, free, virtualization technology, I suggest QEMU.