Using an iPhone to fix an ESX server while on vacation

As you may or may not know, I was recently on a ’sort of’ vacation in Austin, TX., meaning I was still working on my latest book, VMware vSphere and Virtual Infrastructure Security: Securing ESX and the Virtual Environment (which you can pre-order now on Amazon), so it was not much of a vacation. While away from my office I needed to access my host servers to fix a VMware ESX security element, which required not Virtual Infrastructure Client access, but console access.

To the rescue was my handy iPhone and the TouchTerm application that I downloaded for free. TouchTerm provides an SSH client for accessing a remote SSH server. The application even allows the use of pre-shared keys, which alleviates the major security concern when using SSH and other SSL-based codes.

Using TouchTerm I was able to access my SSH server and then my ESX hosts service consoles to fix the security problem that occurred.

Another item I am looking forward to adding to my Virtualization Toolbox is Virtualization Manager Mobile from Andrew Kutz and H9Labs. I had a great discussion with Andrew when I was on vacation and some new features coming to VMM look very promising. I have been looking for a secure mobile virtualization manager and hopefully it will be here soon.

For now, TouchTerm adds a much-needed mobile access capability to my Virtualization Toolbox. Bonus: it also supports vSphere.