vmware: unable to read console output

[Gary Kotton]

When using the compute driver vmwareapi.VMwareVCDriver, the output of nova console-log is problematic. This is due to the fact that it is in PNG format.

[Shawn Hartsock (hartsock)]

So the fundamental problem here is that the console on ESXi is a kind of a software KVM switch (with KVM being an abbreviation for "keyboard, video and mouse") thing that doesn't assume a TTY at all. That means the API in vCenter and ESX don't expose a way to grab text based console output. If I'm wrong, I'd love to hear about it.

Based on this document:
http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-51/index.jsp#com.vmware.wssdk.apiref.doc/vim.VirtualMachine.html#createScreenshot

NOTE: I would love to be wrong about this, but I don't think there's a generic way to solve the problem. There is probably a guest/instance vmtools set of commands that might be used to solve the problem in a guest/instance specific way.

[OpenStack Infra (hudson-openstack)]

Fix proposed to branch: master
Review: https://review.openstack.org/43284

[OpenStack Infra (hudson-openstack)]

Reviewed: https://review.openstack.org/43284
Committed: http://github.com/openstack/nova/commit/2ce3461595a490c9a02272ee4a1ab1eb55c27f60
Submitter: Jenkins
Branch: master

commit 2ce3461595a490c9a02272ee4a1ab1eb55c27f60
Author: Gary Kotton <email address hidden>
Date: Thu Aug 22 05:59:09 2013 -0700

    VMware: provide a coherent message to user when viewing console log

    The vCenter and ESX returns a PNG format. Currently there is no way
    to display a text based format. This at least provides the user with
    a message that is informative.

    Fixes bug: 1199754

    Change-Id: I382219ca89a1574ca233b0f25a89af63af71a22f

[Eric Brown (ericwb)]

Wouldn't access to the serial console work? Serial consoles are text based. And there's a recent fix for serial console support to the vcenter driver. See https://bugs.launchpad.net/nova/+bug/1294098