As good as VNC is, it looks like it is about to get even better. VNC has teamed up with Intel to put VNC in to the BIOS. While this might not sound that exciting, it is very cool. It opens up a number of new abilities such as being able to install an OS on the remote system. In the past VNC was an application that ran on top of an OS so something like this wasn’t possible. Check out the video below to see a demo of this. I think one of the coolest things in the demo is when they disabled the network adapters and the remote session stayed up. That’s right, it works even if a TCP/IP stack isn’t loaded.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/YBjEDBtU9ew" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

The other day I had three virtual servers running, and I wanted to display the desktop of all three servers at the same time, but VMware only displayed one desktop at a time. The current version of VMware has a feature called, “Remote Display.” When enabled, you can VNC directly into that virtual server. So, I configured this on each server and created a VNC connection to each one. This allowed me to see all three desktops at the same time.

The setup is pretty easy, but I did make one or two false assumptions so I thought I’d document how to configure this to help you avoid the issues I ran into.

1. Select the VM image from within VMware console and go to Settings.

Figure 1

2. Select the Options tab and click Remote Display.

Figure 2

3. Check the Enable remote display check box and enter a port number in the Port field. The port number  must be unique for each image.

Figure 3

4. Click OK and start the image.

Once the image starts, you can VNC to it using the VNCviewer software. Once you launch VNCviewer, you need to specify the IP address of the host machine (not the IP address of the image you are trying to access) and the port number of the image. For insance, in Figure 4, 10.1.14 is the IP address of the host machine and 5903 is the port number I assigned in the remote display setting.

Figure 4

You can also use this feature to VNC to an image from a remote system. This is useful if the VM server is not local and you want access directly to the image.