The free version allows up for ten remote desktop connections, typically more than enough for the majority of home labs. MS Remote Desktop is available for Mac OS, but the one remote desktop application you want to get is Royal TSX. With profiles you can configure the connection settings to your ESX host and with a simple shortcut key combination (for example, Control-command-1, you open a tab to the ESXi host. It can run multiple sessions, each in its own tab. Although Mac OS has a native terminal application, iTerm2 has a couple of cool features that I absolutely love. PuTTY is an SSH and telnet client for the Windows Platform allowing you to have access to the command line of the ESXi server. Here is the list of program and tips and tricks I use on my Mac to manage my Home lab. Throughout the years I discovered tools for Mac OS that replaced their trusted Windows equivalent and with the new release of the HMTL 5 Web client fling it removed dependency on the Client Integration Plugin (CIP). It always felt as a burden and on top of that I didn’t want to spend CPU cycles and waste memory of my home lab on admin VM. Works great! Until you want to rebuild your lab or restructure the environment. To circumvent this, I created a Windows admin VM and installed all my trusted Windows apps, such as Putty, vSphere client and WinSCP. The problem was that I still needed to manage by home lab. Soon ever window device was replaced with an Apple device in my home. When I started with virtualization I also used a windows system, however when I joined VMware I received a MacBook and this was the beginning of the end. The majority of virtual datacenters are managed from Windows systems. He is an author of the vSphere host and clustering deep dive series, podcast host for the Unexplored Territory podcast, and you can follow him on Twitter Managing your virtual datacenter and home lab with a MAC Frankdenneman Follow Frank Denneman is a Chief Technologist at VMware, primarily focusing on Machine Learning technology.

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