So for my email setup I use an OpenBSD firewall behind a hardware firewall (provided by the telecom), and from there I use OpenVPN to connect up to the VPS that in turn forwards email to my Exchange server.
It works great.
Except that the OpenBSD VM just crashed. Â And to top it off I had no other way of accessing inwards except for some test machine that luckily was still on, and I had SSH enabled, along with port redirection.
So a few seconds with putty and you can redirect a local port on your computer to connect to a port on the remote network. Â Dangerous as hell but, it certainly can save the day! (Yes you can even SSH to a machine, and then OpenVPN to it….)
Checking VMware KB 1012382 details a list of what ports are needed by which versions of their products to do what.
[table]
Product,Port,Protocol,Source,Target,Purpose
ESXi 5.x,443,TCP,VI / vSphere Client, ESXi/ESX Host, VI / vSphere Client to ESXi/ESX Host management connection
ESXi 5.x,902,TCP,vSphere Client, ESXi 5.x vSphere, Client access to virtual machine consoles (MKS)
[/table]
These are the two ports needed for basic checking in on the status of a standalone ESXi machine. So in this case I can point the VMware fat client to attach to 127.0.0.1, and add in redirects for TCP ports 443 & 902, which let me login, and start a remote console to see how the VMs are doing.
In later versions, you need to use a proper host name. Â To set this up edit your %windir%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file, and make sure you have something like this:
127.0.0.1 Â Â Â localhost esxiloop
And then point the client to esxiloop, and it ought to connect.