Connecting to a Black Screen!

Hi there,

I created a new pool recently to provide the ability to have my boss come into my lab to help with an interesting Veeam issue.  That failed because the VMs were not joining the domain.  So a problem many of us have seen in the past, and none of the usual things fixed it.  So wait for an interesting article when I solve that.

BTW, I am using vSphere 5.5 U3a and View 6.2.

I thought I would do a 1:1 desktop kind of thing. And that appeared to work.  But, I found that when I did my final test it connected to a black screen.  This is a problem I really do not like.  But here is what I did to solve it.  And, make sure to remember that two of these things were required and not just one.  But not exactly sure which two.

• I have seen this sort of thing solved by uninstalling both VMware Tools and the View agent and installing them again.  But no.
• I could RDP to the desktop with no issues.
• Google found really a lot of things on this subject, but none were View 6.2 but I did find several I liked.
• I thought this would solve my issue - making sure the .vmx file was re-read so I did a shutdown and startup via vCenter.  But nope, I still had a black screen.  Also tried Reset in View admin and still a black screen.
• This article confirmed I had the right video driver so that was no help.
• In this article it suggested I should toggle the video info and I thought this was a good idea.  I am not in typical pool that controls that, but rather I was in a manual assignment thing.  When I accessed the VM settings the Video settings were set to custom but the number of screens and memory fields were blank.  Not sure how that happened but thought it was the culprit.  When I tried to put in 2 and 40 MB it did not let me.  Said something else had it open.  WTF?  So I canceled and went back in and now it was set to 2 and 34 or so MB.  I thought problem solved.  Nope.  Still black screen.
• So I have guests coming over in an hour and I am desperate.  So I check the version of the Mac View Client I am using.  I have two Macs here and I am Viewed in on one working and I am using the other one to test.  The one I am working on is 3.5 and the one I am testing on is 3.4.
• So I upgrade the test Mac from 3.4 to 3.5 and guess what?  It works.  No more black screen.

Important note, I did use at the very beginning the Work Mac using the 3.5 View client and had the black screen.  So the client upgrade at the end is not the real solution but rather only part of it.

But now my boss has a View desktop he can use, and I can get back to the persnickety problem of why won’t VMs deployed from template join the domain?  My Win2K12 template and custom specification works fine so it is only my Win7 and Win7View custom specification that doesn’t work.  Is that the doorbell?  Crap.

I hope that this helps someone else out.

Michael

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