My co-worker has an old Mac, and needs to test something on Windows. His Mac is not powerful enough to run a VM, so he needs the ones I have. I have a few VMs that fit his needs.
The solution I thought of was for me to host the VMs, and for him to connect to them through RDP. If you have a simpler solutions, I’m all ears. And no, we don’t (yet) have a local server to run the VMs on in headless mode (that would be perfect).I use VirtualBox 4.2.12, hosted on Windows 7 Pro. The VM I’m using are downloaded from http://www.modern.ie; right now I’m trying with Windows 7 Enterprise.
The VirtualBox addons are installed on the guest OS; I even have reinstalled them, just in case.In the config of the VM, in the Display/Remote Access tab, I have checked “Enable the server”, port 3390, no authentication, allow multiple connections. I have also tried with various random ports, with the same result
In the Network tab, I have tried NAT and bridge:
- When I use “NAT”, when I try to connect to
m.y.i.p:3390using mstsc, I get a message:Your computer could not connect to another console session on the remote computer because you already have a console session in progress. I can’t find much on this error on Google, and anything I found didn’t work, like here.- When I use “bridge”, I get a classic message when you try to connect to a computer that doesn’t exist or has RDP disabled, using the VM’s IP, even though I have disabled the firewall in the VM.
The firewall has been disabled on both the guest and the host OS.
Do you have any idea on how I can get a remote access into these VMs ?
Thanks
Solution:
I have found a not-very-friendly-but-works solution:
In the VM’s settings:
- Set the RDP port to anything (it works with 5030)
- Set the network access to NAT
- Go to Network > Advanced > Port redirection, add the following line:
RDP ; TCP ; host's IP ; 5030 ; 10.0.2.15 ; 3389
The host’s IP must be the actual host’s IP if you want to connect with another computer, or 127.0.0.1 if you want to connect on the host computer.
My VMs all seem to have 10.0.2.15 as IPs, but maybe that’s a coincidence. Check that, if it doesn’t work.
On the guest OS, check that RDP is enabled: on Win7, right click computer > properties > Remote settings (on the left panel) > Allow connections (I used the “less secure” one)
The VMs downloaded on modern.ie have an “auto-logon” feature that’s nice in general, but annoying in this scenario (they might prevent you from logging in). On Win7, run “netplwiz” and check “Users must enter a user name and password”. The password of the user can be found here (it’s Passw0rd!)