Dual Display

[jammcm]

One thing that I got in a crunch in with Parrallels is that it does not support a secondary monitor. Does Fusion offer support for a secondary monitor? If so is it only video mirroring or does it run dual monitor (streched desktop)?

[admin]

Fusion does not support multiple monitors in the guest at this time.

[jmoreland]

Are there any plans to support more than a single monitor in Unity mode?

[stevenc317]

Parallels does support dual monitor, vmware fusion does not.

[admin]

Actually, AFAIK Parallels doesn't support multiple displays in the guest either; what they do is make one big window that stretches across your displays. This causes problems, since windows maximize to both screens and popups come up in the center.

Anyway, it's VMware policy to not discuss unreleased products or features. The developers are aware that people want this, and want it done properly.

[Rzn8tor]

But you can run the guest on the secondary display... the limitation is that it can only run on one display at a time.

[petec35_2]

Yes, but Parallels solution is still way superior in real usage. It's the only reason I'm still using Parallels as my day to day Vm solution. I'd rather use Vmware, since it's the product I use at work with Windows boxes. And the performance is better than parallels.

But the lack of dual displays is a dealbreaker. On my Mac I use tons of windows and it's horrible to have half your screen taken away just to use Fusion. Especially now with Spaces in Leopard supporting dual monitors. Parallels works nicely there. Having an occasional dialog box show up in the middle of the screen is really no biggie compared the alternative of taking away half of my display space.

And what exactly makes you so sure that "The developers are aware that people want this, and want it done properly." I've been submitting requests for this bug since the first betas, and I've seen nothing more than "thank you, your requests has been received. We're working on it. Blah, blah, mwah, mwah..."

I don't think a policy of silence is good. Especially if it's going to be used as an excuse to keep customers in the dark. I understand protecting IP, trade secrets, blah, blah... I'm not asking them to divulge the technical details of the fix for this problem, or release the code to me. How about just an idea of where in the priority raking of bugs this issues is, and a tentative estimated release date? You know, basic customer service and communications...

And before you accuse me of being impatient or whatever, I've been patient. For many months.

And I've been told "we're working on it". For many months.

Yikes.

[Pat_Lee]

Pete,

We know that multiple monitor support is important and that doing it right is critical in making it easy to use and work as expected.

However, due to VMware policy we are unable to commit to specifics about unannounced product features, product releases, or release schedules. We do our best to put our beta programs in the public, so as many customers as possible see what we are doing once we have releases in progress and features in them.

So, when we have more we can discuss about this feature, we will let everyone know and point them to any potential future beta releases.

Best,

Pat Lee

Senior Product Manager - Mac Products

VMware

[petec35_2]

Thanks Pat. I'll keep watching the betas.

[Neoteny]

Are we there yet?

I can get Leopard to correctly use my big display as a secondary (via the MacBook mini DVI port) but when I try to configure it from within full screen XP/Fusion it tries but gets all confused about which monitor is primary (1) and which is secondary (2), using the big monitor for the primary display and splitting the secondary display between the big monitor and the MacBook display.

If there's yet a way to set XP/Fusion up correctly with primary (1) on the MacBook and secondary (2) on the big display please let me know it.

Thanks,

Bob

[gorkish]

Bob,

A lot has changed in the nearly two years since this post was first written; Fusion now offers full multi-monitor support in both Unity (always enabled) and Fullscreen (enabled by choosing "View->Use all displays in full screen" in fusion) modes; however I'm not sure I fully understand your question.

In both windows and mac the notion of which monitor is 'primary' is completely arbitrary and configurable. On the mac you set primary monitor by dragging the titlebar around in your Displays preference pane. In windows, you choose the checkbox "Use this device as the primary monitor" checkbox in the Display Properties->Settings tab. Again, the monitor numbering in windows is irrelevant; it is simply the order in which the (real or virtual) hardware is enumerated. You should be able to choose whatever you want and windows will do a pretty good job of remembering it.

[Neoteny]

Thanks, gorkish. I was hoping to hear that things had changed!

The behavior I see is very inconsistent and difficult to describe. How about, instead, you instruct me what to do from the state where the XP virtual machine is running in a Leopard window on the MacBook display and the attached display is acting as an upward extended desktop to the MacBook/Leopard.

Where I'd like to end up is with XP virtual machine primary desktop in full screen on the MacBook and the XP upward extended secondary desktop in full screen on the attached display.

Your help is greatly appreciated, thanks.

Bob

[gorkish]

First thing's first. You have to be running VMware Fusion version 2; Version 1 does not support multiple displays - If you do not have the menu item "Use All Displays In Full Screen" you should upgrade your VMware. You also have to be running VMware tools in your XP virtual machine. To install VMware tools if you have not done so, boot your XP VM and select "Install VMware Tools" from the "Virtual Machine" menu in VMware.

All you should have to do now is go to the "View" menu in Fusion and select "Use all displays in full screen" (if it is not already checked) then go back to the View menu and select "Full Screen" (As an alternative to selecting "Full Screen" you can press control-command-enter) - At this point your XP VM should occupy the entirety of both screens. You should be able to verify this by dragging an XP window between monitors.

I believe VMware will automatically set the primary monitor on the VM as the display that the VM window occupies when you switch to full screen; however if your VM is allowing the use of both monitors and your windows taskbar is on the incorrect monitor, right click on your windows desktop, select "Properties", click the "Settings" tab, click the monitor you wish to use as your primary windows display, check the checkbox near the bottom of the window labelled "Use this device as my primary monitor" then click OK. Your taskbar should now move to your selected display. Your desktop icons may not move, however you can drag a box around them and drag them over to the other display if you prefer.

[Neoteny]

gorkish said, "All you should have to do now is go to the "View" menu in Fusion and

select "Use all displays in full screen" (if it is not already checked)

then go back to the View menu and select "Full Screen"

Doh! Doggone if that wasn't simple! Works like a charm.

I notice, however, that the drop-down VMware bar no longer does so when the pointer is moved to the top of the secondary display (which is above the primary.) I could live with going back to window mode for that except that anything on the secondary display is moved to the primary window when going back to window mode.

This pretty much limits to use of the secondary display to temporary use. It would be much better, required actually, if the secondary occupied its own separate window in window mode so that what is on it is retained when switching back and forth. Is there somehting else that I've missed? If not that shouldn't be too much of a fix and needed if it can be said that XP dual display is supported.

Many thanks,

Bob

[gorkish]

That is because that is the mac menubar that is appearing, and it I believe by your description it is still located at the top of the macbook's internal display. It might still appear if you can locate your cursor exactly at the top pixel of that display, but otherwise you'll have to exit out of full screen with ctrl-command-enter, relocate your menubar, or rearrange your displays so you can more easily hit the cursor on that screen edge in the OS X Display preferences.

The other things I would suggest you might try is to drag the VM window onto the second monitor then enter fullscreen using only a single monitor -- windows on one monitor; mac on the other.

Finally, you might try setting up Spaces if you are running leopard (Or download Virtue or Desktop Manager if you are still using Tiger) and run vmware fullscreen on both monitors in one space and keep the other space for os x apps. Set up a hotkey to switch between them and you'll be all set.

[Neoteny]

Yeah, I found the single row of pixels that trigger the menu bar pulldown if you can hold the pointer on the row long enough.

It seems, however, that dual display suppprt is still a work in progress. Depending on the order in which I do things I end up in the darndest of configurations but I cannot get what I need which is a virtualization of the dual display support of XP. I fear that the whole MVware virtual dual display thing is a work still in progress without a lot of incentive to finish it.

I can get dual full screen mode to act just like an XP system with dual displays but that goes away as soon as I go back to window mode (for example to use the Mac.) When I do that, whatever I may have put on the XP extended display gets moved to the XP primary window and if I return to full screen the extended one is wiped clean. Dual displays in full screen mode implies dual windows in window mode to do it right but that seems to have escaped notice.

There seems no way to set up a dual display XP virtual machine with a persistent configuration of items on each display ,as it is possible to do in XP, and have the ability to switch between full screen and window modes so as to be able to do something with the Mac and return to what you had in XP full screen or to shutdown/restart the machine or the vitual machine. Ah well. I'm told that Parallels does it right so I may have to go that route if I find that to be true.

Those of us why currently use dual display in XP absolutely must have it work the same when virtualized in order to move workflow off dedicated XP machines to Leopard/VMware-XP machines.

Many thanks for the help and the soapbox.

Bob

[gorkish]

I'm not really sure how they could do it better except to extend the GUI to allow you to create and manage however many windowed virtual displays you'd like. Windowed mode only supports one display. The behavior you describe is exactly how windows works when you remove the secondary display, so what you are really asking for is a way for windows to remember and rearrange your window positions when the guest goes from multiple monitors to single monitor back to multiple monitors again. You might have some success running software like UltraMon in the guest OS, but I don't know if it has a feature like that. There are programs that help you rearrange your desktop icons in that circumstance.

Still, I think the best suggestion for you is to find a way to leave vmware running in fullscreen and still manage your mac workflows. My suggestions offered one method of continuing to use your mac software while vmware remains in fullscreen mode on both displays -- assign vmware to a seperate space in Spaces (In system preferences) and set up a keyboard hotkey to switch between spaces (This is what I do) You can also use VMware's unity mode which supports all displays natively, or simply command-tab to another mac application without taking vmware out of fullscreen view.

Considering that I believe vmware is the only virtualization solution offering proper guest-aware multi-monitor support (on several different guest os's too), their virtual display support is about the best you can get. About the only thing I am personally missing at this point is WDDM support for their windows display driver and linux OpenGL support. At least the WDDM support we know is being worked on, and I suspect if they do it right it will be about the biggest benefit to virtual displays that we have yet seen as it ought to allow guests to render individual windows directly into the host video card's texture memory and allow them to be composited natively by the host. I think probably at that point, I will start liking Unity a lot more.