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What is the vKVM System?

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konsoleH™

Our award winning proprietary control panel empowers customers to manage their hosting environment.

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The vKVM System (virtual Keyboard/Video/Mouse System) enables you to start your server’s OS via a virtual machine, using your physical hard drive resources (SATA and IDE drives are directly connected to the guest system). vKVM mode is particularly helpful when trying to diagnose a boot problem or if a firewall has been misconfigured and you have been locked out of the server, without requiring a remote control unit. e.g. eRIC or LARA. Network access is possible as the virtual machine is using the same MAC address as the physical NIC. This means that DHCP and the rescue system are both working inside vKVM.

You are able to view and operate this virtual environment via a Java applet as if it were your server’s monitor.

To activate the vKVM Rescue System:

  1. Browse to konsoleH (http://myaccount.hetzner.co.za)
  2. Login with your Customer number or email address and Management password
  3. Select or search for your Truserv™ server in the ‘Hosting Service’ tab
  4. Select ‘Manage Services’ from the left-hand menu.
  5. Select ‘Rescue System’
  6. Select ‘vKVM System’
  7. Click on ‘Activate’
  8. A randomly generated password will be given to you to access vKVM mode. (Copy the password immediately).
  9. Reboot your server within 5 minutes to enter vKVM mode. vKVM mode will automatically deactivate after 5 minutes if you have not rebooted.
  10. Browse to the URL provided to open the Java applet.
  11. Enter the username (vkvm) and password provided in step 3.
  12. Use the applet as if it were the monitor of your server. Whatever you type will take effect within the virtual environment.
  13. Once you have diagnosed the problem and/or completed the repair, shut down the virtual instance.
  14. Use the Remote Reboot tool within konsoleH to reboot your server into normal mode.

To leave vKVM mode and boot directly from the hard drive again:

  1. Shut down the virtual machine cleanly to prevent corruption of the file system, using one of the methods below:
    • Send a “Ctrl-Alt-Del” signal within the vKVM viewer (making sure you then reboot the physical server before the virtual instance boots up again).  Or,
    • Perform a shutdown of the virtual machine from the command line (i.e. “$ shutdown -h now”).
  2. Reboot the physical server using the Remote Reboot tool in konsoleH.

NOTE: System Requirements

This feature requires certain BIOS settings to be enabled on your server and is only available on 64Bit hardware (all servers ordered in the last 4 years should be 64Bit).  Should you experience any issues activating the vKVM system, please contact .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) to assist you.

Note:

The Operating System running on the hard drives in vKVM mode cannot connect to the following ports. (i.e. incoming packets to these ports are not forwarded to the Operating System):

  • 47772 SSH
  • 47773 Web-interface (SSL)
  • 47774 VNC (SSL)

Useful functions

Some useful functions provided by the vKVM interface, are as follows:

  • Refresh - (refreshes the console)
  • Send Ctrl-Alt-Del - (sends Ctrl-Alt-Del (soft reset) to the virtual machine)
  • Send HW Reset - (performs a reset of the virtual machine)
  • The ability to boot into the Linux rescue system within the vKVM viewer: 

Limitations

As vKVM uses virtual hardware components to start the Operating System, there are a number of known limitations:

Linux

If the distribution kernel is used it is common for vKVM to detect SATA drives as SCSI devises, the kernel in use must provide the right modules for the SCSI controller (LSI Logic / Symbios 53c895a).

If the kernels are self-compiled, depending on their configuration, they may not have this module with the result that your server image will not boot successfully within the vKVM system.

Windows

vKVM automatically detects Windows installations and forwards the SATA hard drive as IDE drives; this is because the SCSI controller, when used by Windows, is likely to be problematic.

If no IDE drives are detected during installation; Windows deactivates the IDE drivers. Before using vKVM, the IDE drivers must be reactivated.

Your Windows license may require reactivation depending on the license model.  This may be due to how the Windows hardware replication differs notably from the physical hardware.

The network settings of the physical NIC cannot be changed as the corresponding network interface is not displayed in the control panel.

OpenSolaris, ESXi, Citrix XenServer

OpenSolaris, ESXi and Citrix XenServer are not supported.

Network

If your server has more than one network card it will only have one card passed through to the Virtual Machine. If packets are received on any other physical NIC, these are forwarded to the first NIC in the virtual machine. Outgoing packets are always sent out from the first physical NIC.

Intel VT or AMD-V

The virtualisation features of certain CPUs are not passed through to the virtual machine. Servers with CPUs that do not support Intel VT or AMD-V, will run very slow in vKVM mode.

32-bit CPUs

32-bit CPUs are not supported.

 

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