Our friends over at the Team Fusion Blog have an excellent post on how you can use TeamViewer to easily access your virtual machines sitting on your PC or Mac from your Apple iPad or iPhone. And best of all, it is free. This is a great way to not only access VMware Workstation virtual machines, but remotely connect to your host PC without dealing with firewall issues.
If you prefer to only access a VMware Workstation virtual machine and do not have firewall or encryption concerns, you can configure VMware Workstation to allow any VNC client to access the virtual machine remotely. There is no need to install specialized VNC software in a virtual machine to do this. To configure a VMware Workstation virtual machine as a VNC server:
- Select the virtual machine and choose VM > Settings.
- Click the Options tab and select Remote Display.
- Click Enable remote display.
- (Optional) Change the port number. To connect to multiple virtual machines on the same host with a VNC client, specify a unique port number for each virtual machine.
- (Optional) Set a password for connecting to the virtual machine from a VNC client. Please note that the VNC remote connection is NOT encrypted.
- Click OK.
To connect to the virtual machines running VNC from your iPad or iPhone:
- Install any VNC client from the iOS App Store.
- Make sure the client is set for hextile encoding.
- Set the client to use all colors.
- When prompted for the VNC server name, enter the name or IP address of the host
computer and the port number. Use the format: <machine_name>:<port_number> - Enter a password if you are prompted to do so.
For more detailed information, read the section titled “Using VNC for Remote Connections to a Virtual Machine” on page 228 of the VMware Workstation manual.
