• Remote Access is a weak spot in XenServer since the primary management tool is XenCenter on Windows.
• XenCenter is not NAT-friendly.
• Most XenCenter-to-XenServer communications happen on ports 22 (SSH) and 443 (HTTPS).
• Linux guest consoles use VNC starting on port 5901.
• Since standard SSH is available, the first management tool to grab is xsconsole.

• xsconsole is the built-in text-mode console on XenServer.
• xsconsole is useful, but it doesn't provide guest console visibility.
• If you can SSH into the XenServer, just run xsconsole at the CLI.

You can get partial functionality by simply forwarding port 443 into the XenServer.

The easiest way I've found to access the console of a VM running on a XenServer behind NAT is:

1. Enable remote SSH access directly to the XenServer
   • You can forward a non-standard port at the firewall (i.e. 22222) to the standard port 22 at the XenServer
2. To access a VM's console, you must tunnel through localhost (the XenServer)
3. Use SSH port forwarding to forward a VM's VNC port (5901, 5902, 5903, etc.) to 'localhost'
   • Each VM runs on a different VNC port
   • Each VM's VNC console is only available to localhost (the XenServer)
4. The IP address of the VM doesn't matter and can even change without affecting remote access

You can determine which VNC port is assigned to which VM like this:

Log into the XenServer via SSH:

ssh -p 22222 -l root <your-remote-xenserver>

Determine the domain ID and VNC port of your target VM:

xe vm-list
list_domains
netstat -lp|grep -w <domid> |awk '{print $4}'|cut -d: -f2

Now you can forward the port(s) and access the VNC console of the VM from another terminal on your remote workstation:

ssh -p 22222 -l root -L <local-vnc-port>:localhost:<vm-vnc-port> <your-remote-xenserver>

vncviewer localhost:<last-vnc-port-digit>