Accessing virtual machines through a web browser

Are there Virtual Machine Servers that you can install Virtual Machines on and then the clients can just fire up the OS (Windows, Mac, Linux) through the web browser?

That would be very efficient.

Solution 1:

I don't think there are many out-of-the-box products that will do what you want. The closest would be something from VMware. If you wanted to spend some time though, you could use a combination of Xen + libvirt + Virtual Machine Manager to achieve something close, but it's still limited to the desktop I believe.

It's also worth mentioning the potential security risk by having your hypervisor exposed through a web browser. If you have many machines running on your server, one exploit through the browser will expose all your VMs at once to an attacker. Your hypervisor/virtual machine server should be preciously protected because of this.

Solution 2:

VMware's ESX pretty much does this by default although this feature has now been removed from ESXi and will not be available in future releases after V4.1 once the ESXi variant becomes the only one that VMware will update in future. Web based access to a remote guest console is trivially easy to provide for ESX but as others have said there are some serious security issues with this that limit its practical use.