Enabling VNC Server Mode on an Amazon EC2 Windows Instance

Question

I have installed RealVNC on my Amazon EC2 Windows Instance.

I want to use the free version, so I have to use the VNC Authentication option, where a password is set in the VNC config.

BUT: I can only see the VNC config for user mode. When I run VNC in User Mode on the server, I can connect to the server.

I cannot set the auth mode and auth password for the VNC Server Mode. The RealVNC docs say that there should be a systray icon for the server, and there isn't.

I assume that the issue is related to the Windows 2008 R2 security model.

How do I: 1.) Change the VNC server so that the systray icon shows? or 2.) Change the VNC config in some other way?

Solution 1

Have you considered using RDP instead? If you need to access the console you can use the /admin command line switch with mstsc which will let you see the console session in windows.

As far as RealVNC, it has been a while, but if I recall, VNC has to be installed in "service-mode" rather than user mode. See http://www.realvnc.com/products/open/4.1/winvnc.html#ServiceMode Basically in a nutshell it install VNC as a service that runs on the host. That way it survives users sessions starting and stopping.

But use RDP if you can, it's built in and designed for this.

Solution 2

I'll add some information to a VERY specific case of AWS Windows Instance and that is the GPU family.

According to AWS:

"When using Remote Desktop, GPUs that use the WDDM driver model are replaced with a non-accelerated Remote Desktop display driver. To access your GPU hardware, you must use a different remote access tool, such as VNC. You can also use one of the GPU AMIs from the AWS Marketplace because they provide remote access tools that support 3-D acceleration."

From:http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/WindowsGuide/using_cluster_computing.html#install-nvidia-driver-windows

So you DO NEED VNC on your server if you want to take advantage of any 3d rendering.

Comments

[Hans]

If you use an instance type which has GPU resources (e.g. g2.2xlarge), using RDP is actually not a good idea, since no graphics drivers get loaded for an RDP session. Even Amazon's documentation states you need to use something VNC for these instance types.