Saturday, October 4, 2008

VMPlayer Remote Desktop Display

While doing research, I was looking through various methods of performing thin client mode on computers. Mainly there was the VNC and X11. Well X11 would have offered the simplest solution to running the application across a server.

But they are essentially and some would argue that X11 is really not a thin client framework. (depending on how you define thin client). But anyhow, they are really different in the sense that VNC displays by pixel frame buffer refresh, it usually hosts a whole desktop (usually including a window manager) and reconnection to a lost connection would be simple as compared to X11.

Well, therefore I didn't had much choice and need to run VMPlayer using the VNC Protocol.
With the protocol settled, now I had to solve how to run multiple VMPlayer session on a computer and have it served simultaneously to different computers that connects to it. On top of that, computer 2 has to serve the client across the network to various clients remotely.

First of all, in computer 2(the server)
I have VMPlayer running in Linux, I added, the following lines to the VMX file, RemoteDesktop.add = "Enabled"
RemoteDesktop.port = "5901".

Then in computer 1(the client)
I have a VNC Player which will try to connect to port 5901 on Computer 2. Any normal VNC Player can run, e.g. UltraVNC or gtk-vnc (there is an example player for linux)

But VMPlayer does not render when we try to run it via a client. How do we actually run instance of VMPlayer remotely? I believe the answer lye in disabling the output of VMPlayer locally on the server. More research on this to come...

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