# VPN / Remote desktop connection with several parallel sessions



## Matthurin (Jan 9, 2014)

Hi guys,

My name is Matthieu and I'm pretty new here... Hopefully you guys will be able to help me with this issue.

I'm working in numerical modelling in hydrodynamics, and my department recently bought a powerful workstation that will be dedicated to simulations and heavy computations only.

The idea I had regarding this workstations is that instead of having to go and sit in front of it to work, I'd like my colleagues and I to be able to access it remotely and run the simulations we need on it.

I succeeded to do so thanks to Teamviewer and its remote desktop option, but it only works for one person.
The thing is that we are likely to have to run simulations at the same time, and for this reason I would like to be able to remotely access the workstations, but with several sessions at the same time, so that each of my colleague and I would have its own session and could run simulations separately on this workstation. 

One IT guy working here from time to time told me about Terminal services or something like that, but I'm not sure that's what I'm looking for...

Any help or tutorials to perform such a thing would be greatly appreciated!

Cheers,

Matthieu


----------



## DRDNA (Jan 9, 2014)

Welcome to TPU!
If you have the New PC for  heavy computations only, your performance will per job be greatly reduced by any extra sessions doing other jobs.

What make and model PC, or what is the build? Like processor and mobo and ram and harddisk and video card, also what OS? Sometimes the GPU cards can perform much better with demanding calculations. What programs are you using to run the calculations?


----------



## v12dock (Jan 9, 2014)

Have you looked into VNC? Tightvnc allows you to map additional ports to create additional sessions.


----------



## Kaynar (Jan 9, 2014)

You can run windows or Ubuntu, then load as many virtual machines as you want eg using VMWare. Each VM on the PC can then be accessed independently by different users at the same time. Some special network configurations have to be done though (including on your modem) and I don't really remember how to do that.

The result is that when connecting to the PC remotely using RealVNC by entering IP address including a specific port and your personal password which is tied to that particular port (the network port plays the role of the user name which is tied to your personal password) (the VMs are windows, the base OS is also windows in my case) then, depending on the  port you entered you are logged in on your specific virtual windows environment. The resources allocated to each VM where 1 Thread and 2GB ram on an i7 system and I am certain that there is a way to let the PC adjust that dynamically.

That's the only help I can give you, as I am not the person who setup this system and I haven't even used it in the past 2 months.


----------



## ChristTheGreat (Jan 9, 2014)

There is a way to get Terminal server over a Windows 7 (I guess 8 is the same) to run multiple session. I have to try it, but people says it seems to work.

http://lifehacker.com/5873717/enable-concurrent-remote-desktop-sessions-in-windows-with-this-patch

http://blog.tsukasa.eu/2012/06/08/windows-7-enable-concurrent-rdp-multiple-sessions-per-user

User Windows are by default limited, not like Windows server where you have Terminal Server (that you need to buy license). The other would be like Kaynar said, with Virtual Machine..

Any modification is at your own risk.


----------



## Matthurin (Jan 9, 2014)

Thanks a lot for your answer! I'll have a look at VNC and VMWare, it looks pretty close to what I'm looking for. Though I'm not sure I want to have only a "part" of the computer when other people are not connected, but if a dynamic method is available, that could be great!
DRDNA the PC is an HP Z820 workstation, with an Intel Xeon E5 2620 cpu at 2Ghz, with 16GB RAM and a NVIDIA Quadro K2000 graphic card.
We mostly use software such as Matlab for 2nd order linear/nonlinear differential equations which request quite some computational effort, as well as Boundary Element Method code such as Orcaflex or Wamit which perform computations with a lot of unknowns.

Thanks again for your answers!

Matthieu


----------

