VMWare Horizon dual screen scaling/sizing issue

[Anonymous]

Hello, I am a VMWare Horizon user in an organization that uses this platform for both remote and in-office work. I am having an issue that I was hoping this community would be able to help with - if I am in the wrong place, please kindly direct me where to go..

I am having an issue with screen size when trying to use two screens while working from home. I am using a Dell XPS 15 with a native resolution of 3840x2160 and an external Dell 24" monitor with a native resolution of 2560x1440. In my local (non-remote) Windows 10 system the scaling of text and apps etc is set to 250% on the laptop screen and 125% on the external monitor, which produce comfortably sized application windows and icons etc. I used to be able to launch a VMWare Horizon session and set up the same percentages on the two screens until about three weeks ago so that the applications, text and icons would appear the same size whether I was on my local system or connected to the remote session. Since things were working correctly, I did not take screenshots of what exact settings I was using, but it was "Fullscreen - All Monitors" and I believe "Allow display scaling" was OFF. One day around 12/28/21 that no longer worked, and the remote session window (in fullscreen mode) was about half the size of my laptop screen with the rest black, and the external monitor screen was also black. When switching "Allow display scaling" ON, the laptop screen filled up with the correct icon sizing, but the external monitor was now way out of scale, with all icons and text appearing twice as large and therefore not practical for work.

I should also note that when I use the "Fullscreen - Single Monitor" mode on my external monitor only, the resolution and sizing is perfect. But when I then switch to "Fullscreen - All Monitors", the laptop screen is half size again with black surround, and the external monitor is black. I was previously using the 2106 version and just updated to 2111 to see if that makes a difference but no luck. I wonder if there was some kind of a software change around Christmas that caused this issue for me, and if I could possibly revert back to the previous version when things were functioning correctly? Any help appreciated - thanks.

[Mickeybyte]

Hi, 

You should reach out to your (Horizon) sysadmins first. They might have changed something on the server side.

[Anonymous]

@Mickeybyte - that was the first thing I did but they did not say that anything changed on the server side. Their response was to direct me to this link which I did not find helpful and to advise that I should consider getting the standard office hardware for my home setup if I keep having this issue. I would prefer to not get additional hardware if that is not absolutely necessary. This seems like a fairly straightforward issue that I imagine many VMWare Horizon users have had. And it is especially frustrating because things were working fine until one day they weren't.

[Mickeybyte]

I'm afraid it is something that will need to be checked further with your sysadmin and/or with VMware support. More detailed troubleshooting of logfiles might shed a light on it why this happens.

If things work one day and suddenly they don't anymore, most of the times a change somewhere is the cause of it, but it isn't always easy to find...

[JahnsTek]

Hey @Anonymous ,

I would recommend making sure your Horizon Client is up to date (current version is 2111 build 8.4.0). You can download from https://www.vmware.com/go/viewclients

The Horizon Client should set the scaling of the virtual desktop to match each monitor's scale setting of the device you're connecting from.

Some of our users were experiencing some scaling issues with an older Horizon Client (specifically 8.2.0) which was causing the scaling to happen twice (physical device scaling set to 125%, and then virtual desktop was scaling another 125% making everything unusably HUGE). Upgrading the Horizon Client resolved this. I know it's not the same issue you described, but it's always good to keep Horizon Client up to date.

I suspect our issue started after upgrading VMware Horizon to 2111 (8.4.0) or possibly a Windows update that modified how scaling works in Windows 10 (my understanding is M$ re-wrote scaling for Windows 11, so maybe some of that is making it into Win10 updates?)

Justin

[Anonymous]

@JahnsTek - when I noticed the issue, I updated from 2106 to 2111 build 8.4.0 to see if that would help but it didn't. Thanks for the suggestion though.

I have Windows 10 on both the local and remote machine. But I would imagine if a Windows update threw something off, more VMWare Horizon users would be having this issue?

[JahnsTek]

If it were a Windows Update caused issue, I agree, probably would affect more people... But on the same hand, I'm not sure how many people would have different scaling settings across multiple monitors... Maybe more than I think?

Also on a side note... It may be likely that your Horizon sys admins upgraded Horizon "around 1/28/21" as I also completed an emergency upgrade of my Horizon environment (to 2111) a few days before that to remediate Log4j vulnerabilities.

[Jhay-ar]

I have the same issue with my MacBook Pro M1. My extended(secondary) monitor is experiencing scaling issue when I'm in full screen mode. 

[Kilroy526]

Before launching a session, try rename the following file;  C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\VMware\VMware Horizon View Client\prefs.txt.  There are setting in the file concerning monitor setup. I have seen where the changes have been made for one monitor become an issue on another monitor because they are hard set in the file based on the desktop ID.