# Advanced

There are several advanced features provided within VM Essentials that can leverage some cool aspects of VMware. One of these features is Remote Console support directly to the hypervisor. To enable this feature a few prerequisites must be met. First, the VM Essentials appliance must have network access to the ESXi hosts within VCenter. Secondly, firewall settings need to be adjusted on each ESXi host. This can be done in VSphere under firewall configuration on the host. Simply check the gdbserver option, which will open up the necessary ports (starting at 5900 range).

IMPORTANT

Hypervisor Console for vCenter 6.5 requires VM Essentials v3.2.0+

Now that the ESXi hosts are ready to utilize remote console, simply edit the cloud in VM Essentials via Infrastructure  >  Clouds. Check the option that says Enable Hypervisor Console. It is important to note that currently this functionality only works for newly provisioned vm’s provisioned directly via VM Essentials. This should change soon however.

It is also possible to import vm snapshots for backup or conversion purposes from VCenter and also an ESXi host. However, this does require that the ESXi host license has an enterprise level license as it will not allow the appliance to download a virtual image if it is not a paid VMware license.
