I recently experienced some strange behaviour at a customer, we had a newly deployed vRA 7.2 platform, and we also built a test 7.3 and had the issue on both versions.

I should point out here that this particular customer runs on a G-Cloud site, so it’s a secure platform heavily firewalled and there is no internet access to the infrastructure.

What was happening was that when a user connected to a VM using the Remote Console they would hit the below error:

“Cannot establish a remote console connection , verify that the machine is powered on if the server has self-signed certificate, you might need to accept certificate, then close and retry the connection”

A quick google of that error will lead you to the following KB Article I followed the steps but alas no joy, also where my issue was different was that if you hit refresh on the browser the console would load, which was even stranger.

In the end I had to log a ticket with VMware Support, after the ticket was escalated to the software team, we were given the solution.

There is a default timeout when initiating the Remote Console connection, unfortunately the setting isn’t documented, and I am not sure what the default timeout setting is, I do know that to replicate our issue VMware support had to drop their timeout to 500ms.

So you need to find the file to edit, which is:

“/etc/vcac/security.properties”

Go to the end of the file and add the below setting:

“consoleproxy.timeout.connectionInitMs=20000”

You can fine tune the setting to what ever your environment needs, 20000ms seemed to be the sweet spot for us.

Hope this helps someone else out there, the only thing we can think is that some kind of CRL lookup, or other checks are happening when the connection is being created and due to our environment having no internet access these fail and increase the initiation time.

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