Remote controlling/shadowing a View Desktop

[Dave_McD]

I was hoping that I would be able to use the Web Client to be able to shadow a users View Desktop, but it does not work as it logs the user of if I go to the console.

Can someone tell me please what the best way is to shadow a desktop? I don't want to use PC Anywhere or anything like that, I thought Vmware would have a way to do this.

[mikebarnett]

The only real way to do this with PCoIP at the moment is to enable the following GPO:

Enable access to a PCoIP session from a vSphere console

Details about this can be found starting on page 194 of the View Admin Guide:

http://pubs.vmware.com/view-51/topic/com.vmware.ICbase/PDF/view-51-administration.pdf

Hopefully this helps.

-Mike

[Dave_McD]

Thanks Mike, that sort of helps. Are there any plans in the future to allow console access to RDP sessions?

[mikebarnett · Accepted solution]

Unfortunately we can't directly provide console access to RDP sessions because of the way that RDP connections work.

RDP actually spawns a separate virtual session that the user connects to which causes the vSphere console to show a locked screen.

When PCoIP runs it is spinning up a server process which hooks into the virtual video card of the virtual desktop. We use the Agent to log the user in and then connect the PCoIP session directly to the video card of that console session through the network.

I don't know if there are any plans to develop some sort of specific shadowing that would support both RDP and PCoIP.

-Mike

[Dave_McD]

As a follow up, we can actually shadow the sessions using Windows Remote Assist or using the shadow command from the command line. I would still prefer a way to centralise it but you can't always get what you want.