We would like to provide console only access to certain machines hosted on vSphere, as if they were sitting in front of a physical machine. How would one set the permissions to achieve this goal with the full vSphere client? Is there a lightweight console-only client available? I imagine the permissions would have to be addressed no matter which client was used.
Lightweight way to provide only console access to VMware vSphere hosted machines
vmware-vspherevsphere-client
Best Answer
As for how to grant them console access, there's a role permission at "Virtual machine|Interaction|Console interaction" that you could grant (after creating a custom role for that permission) to your users on the specific virtual machines. After launching the VM client and connecting to the appropriate host or vcenter they could then have console access to the virtual machines you've assigned the custom role to.