VCN Console Connection from Windows to Oracle Cloud Virtual Machine Instance

I generallay use cloud shell for console connections, but recently for bringing an image to OCI, troubleshoot and complete the installation I needed serial connection. I am using Windows with WSL, and most of my customers also prefer Windows, so I thought this will be good idea to take note of the steps for future myself as well as customers. This is based on my colleague Florian's Git Post . So here we go:

Steps

1 Download and unzip Portable Git Bash I prefer portable one, you can also install it with right click context menu integration. This will give us ssh in Windows without going into Powershell details.

2 Download a VNC Viewer, I prefer TigerVNC as it doesn't require any installation.

3 Create a console connection to the instance:

• Go to OCI Console and Compute
• Find your instance and click on the name
• Go to OS Management tab and scroll down to Console Connections
• Click Create local connection

• You can use OCI generated ssh keys, or bring your own key.

You can use compute instance-connection create cli command.

4 Copy VNC connection string for Linux/Mac

You can use compute instance-connection list cli command by filtering only ACTIVE connections.

5 We will update the command to use SSH key for authentication
After adding -i ~/.ssh/jump-server.key -o HostKeyAlgorithms=+ssh-rsa -o PubkeyAcceptedKeyTypes=+ssh-rsa to the script and it will look like this

6 Run the script in git bash

7 Connect using VNC Viewer to VNC server at localhost:5900

Some usefull scripts

Find all RUNNING instances in $compartment_id where instance name like 'qradar':

Find all ACTIVE console connection for particular $compute_instance_ocid:

Generic script without OCI CLI dependency with minimum input:

All in one script which finds compute instance, creates console connection and start SSH port forwarding for VNC serial connection :