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Multi Monitor support in the Vista TS Client.
Published Sep 07 2018 05:44 PM 628 Views
First published on CloudBlogs on Nov, 09 2006

One of the new features of the Terminal Server/Remote Desktop Client in Windows Vista is the support for multiple monitors.  If the machine running the TS-Client has a multi-monitor configuration that creates one logical rectangle, then the TS-Client can span over all the monitors, creating one virtual desktop of the combined size.

For example, this configuration is suitable for multimon spanning:

(-1024,0)         |
--+--------------+------------------> x
|              |              |
|              |              |
|              |              |
|              |              |
+--------------+--------------+ (1024,768)
| y
V

While this configuration is not suitable for multimon spanning:


|
--+--------------+--------------+---> x
|              |              |
|              |              |
|              |              |
|              |              |
+--------------+ (1024,768)   |
|              |              |
| y            +--------------+ (2304,1024)
V


You can access the functionality using commandline options, in one of two ways:
If you know the rectangle dimensions of your virtual desktop:


mstsc /w:2048 /h:768 /v:<servername>

or if you want mstsc.exe to figure-out the dimensions:

mstsc /span /v:<servername>

There are a few limitations of multi-monitor spanning:
* The maximum dimensions of the virtual desktop in a TS-Session is hard-coded to 4096x2048, regardless of the color-depth and the available resources on the remote machine.
* The remote session will see your virtual desktop as one giant display.This reduces the complexity of the multi-display implementation in the remote session, while still allowing the windowed mode of the TS-Client to
be functional and viable.

Version history
Last update:
‎Sep 07 2018 05:44 PM