Accessing your VM

Remote Accessing your VM

You can always login to Proxmox and gain access to your VM using the Proxmox web interface. Though, from a security standpoint you would not want to provide everyone with access to the management interface of Proxmox. You can configure each VM to allow for a VNC (Virtual Network Computing) connection. VNC provides the ability to provide a remote desktop (screen sharing) to the VM. Using VNC it means that we can interface with our VM like it is right in front of us.

In order to use VNC we need to have a VNC client installed on our personal computer. I like using TigerVNC as it is free and works across multiple platforms (Windows, Intel-based Macs and Linux). Being able to use TigerVNC on any OS is a huge bonus, as you don't need to learn how to use multiple VNC client applications. At the moment the latest release is 1.12.0 and can be downloaded here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/tigervnc/files/stable/1.12.0/. Please download and install TigerVNC as that is what I'll also use during my demo videos below. If you have an Apple M1/M2 CPU you should be able to run TigerVNC with Rosetta 2.

Configuring Proxmox

Below are the steps that we need to do in order to add VNC to a VM.

Login to Proxmox and open a terminal window.
1. Option 1: Use Web interface: Select pve -> shell
2. Option 2: ssh into Proxmox.
Navigate to /etc/pve/local/qemu-server/
Type ls and locate the configuration file that has the same VM ID as the one you wish to add VNC support.
Open the file for editing: nano 100.conf (100 is the VM ID)
Add a line at the end of the file:
args: -vnc 0.0.0.0:77
Save the file and restart the VM.
The display number (77 in the line above) is able to be picked how ever you wish. Though, it must be unique! This is due to VNC listening to that value + 5900 (so in our above example it'd listen on 5977).
The following are optional if you wish to configure a password with VNC.
OPTIONAL: You can configure a password with VNC. Replace Step 5 with the following:
args: -vnc 0.0.0.0:77,password=on
Save the file and restart the VM.
OPTIONAL: If you do Step 9 you must also set the password (maximum length of 8 characters) after the VM has been restarted
set_password vnc ics131 -d vnc2
When a VNC connection is attempted it will ask for a password (ics131).
Keep in mind that if you restart the VM you will need to reset the password.

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse