Just a quick one today. VMware Workstation has the ability to attach serial ports to virtual machines and guest operating systems such as Vyatta use the /dev/ttyS0 serial port as a console port, allowing you to simulate administering the system “headless”. One situation you may want to use this in is when you’re trying to copy screen text output for a blog 
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Configuring VMware Virtual Machine
Follow these steps to add a serial port to your VMWare Workstation virtual machine:
- Attach the serial port to your VM. Open your VM settings dialog and click Add
- Select Serial Port and click Next
- Select Output to named pipe and click Next
- Now you need to specify configuration for the named pipe. Make sure you select “This end is the server” and “The other end in an application” otherwise you won’t get any output from your console. Click Finish.
NOTE: The named pipe is created and deleted each time you power on, and power off your VM.
Configuring PuTTY Connection
When you launch PuTTY, you need to select Serial connection type, and then enter in the pipe name into the Serial Line text box:
Once you connect, you’ll be able to configure your VM (be it Vyatta, or some other flavour) all via the VM’s serial interface:
So there you have it. Just a quick one today, but useful none the less.
Thank you. This is exactly what I was looking for. This really helped me setup Olive on my system.
very helpfull
By the way, it is possible to connect named pipe remotely via network.
Just use \\%remote_server%\pipe\com_1 notation.
Thanks, exactly what I looked for! Great comment regarding the network connection!
Very cool. I just tried this and it worked perfectly!