Running Multiple Instances of the View Client

Have you ever wanted to launch multiple View instances as different users but from the same client?

I'll start by saying that this is unsupported and should not be used in production. 

This can however be very useful in set up and testing where you may want to remain logged into one desktop as an admin user and log in and out of another as a standard user.

What is supported is the use of command line parameters that you can pass to the View Client. If you open a CMD prompt and run "C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware View\Client\bin\wswc.exe" -? you get a list of the possible parameters.

This allows you to create short cuts with the following:

"C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware View\Client\bin\wswc.exe" -serverURL https://<connectionserver> -userName Test1 -domainName DEMO -password testpassword -desktopName "Pool Name"

Very useful as it stops us having to specify the test user, password, etc. each time, but we can only run a single instance of the View Client.

To run multiple instances of the View Client we can add an undocumented switch -Standalone. This allows us to have multiple instances of the View Client logged in as different users each in their own Window.


To do the equivalent on a MAC:

• In Finder browse to Applications
• Right click the VMware View Client and select Show Package Contents. 
• Browse into Contents and MacOS. 
• Double clicking on vmware-view will open a Terminal Window and launch a new instance of the View Client.

Just remember the use of the -Standalone switch and running multiple instances is unsupported.