Guacamole

Apache Guacamole is a clientless remote desktop gateway that supports standard protocols like VNC, RDP, and SSH. Guacamole has been integrated into the VRE using a Single Sign-On Protocol and is configured on a per-project basis by a System Administrator so that each project has its own deployment of Guacamole and an assigned Guacamole Administrator.

Project Administrators may contact the Platform Administrator at vre-support@charite.de to set up Guacamole for their project. Additional information can be found at https://guacamole.apache.org/doc/gug/administration.html.

Users are reminded that the VRE Platform Terms of Use prohibit any code or files containing personal information of data subjects from entering the VRE, including workbench tools unless it has first been uploaded to the Green Room and approved by the Project Administrator for use in the VRE Core.

Requesting access to Guacamole

Once Guacamole has been deployed as a workbench tool for a new Project, Project members can request permission to access that Project's instance of Guacamole by clicking on the Guacamole icon in the left sidebar of the Project landing page.  

A prompt will appear to send the request, once the user clicks send, the System Administrator for the Project will receive an email notification and a portal notification. The System Administrator can then set up the user's access control from the Users tab in the Project's Guacamole Settings page, and grant user access to individual Virtual Machines (VM) connected through Guacamole.

Once permission has been set up, the System Administrator can then mark the request as "Complete" in the User Management tab of the VRE Portal. The user will be automatically notified by email that the setup is complete and their access to Guacamole has been granted.  

Project members will then be able to launch and enter the Project-based Guacamole workbench and access the Virtual Machines that they been granted connection permissions for.  

Accessing Virtual Machines through Guacamole

To access a Virtual Machine through Guacamole, follow the steps below:

1. Navigate to the Project landing page and click on the Guacamole icon in the Left Sidebar.
2. Click the name of the VM connection that made available to you. 
3. Enter your VRE user credentials and click OK. 
4. The Virtual Machine will connect automatically.  

1. Desktop VM connection

a. Login to the VM

If you select the Core-Desktop-<ID> or Greenroom-Desktop-<ID> VM to connect for either Core or Greenroom, a login modal will pop up to ask for your VRE user credential when you enter the VM as following screenshot:

b. Launch Linux Terminal inside the Desktop VMs

After the successful login, users will see the default desktop (XFCE4).  To launch the pre-installed Linux applications such as standard terminal, please try the following two steps:

1. Click the "Activities" on the left upside corner.
2. Type "Terminal" in the search box.

2. Command Line VM connection

a. Login to the VM

If you prefer to login as command line directly without GUI, you can select Core-CommandLine-<ID> or Greenroom-CommandLine-<ID> for this need, and then provide VRE credential to login.

3. Greenroom and Core VM connection

VRE Command Line Tool is deployed within each of the Workbench VM as extension resource. The VRE CLI will carry different file operation permissions within Greenroom-VM or Core-VM, which is the only difference between Greenroom-VM and Core-VM.  

For detailed file operation permission differences, please find File Operation Permission Control in VRE CLI

See Also: 

User Roles

Platform Architecture

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