I have a couple of VMWare servers (one on a Windows 2000 host, one on a Ubuntu host), running a handful of virtual machines between them.
I want to access them remotely over a VPN using ADSL, which means the upstream performance is relatively poor. I'm using Hamachi (www.hamachi.cc) to manage the VPN if that's relevant.
What's likely to give me the best remote access performance? Options I can think of are:
\- Remote access to the host (eg VNC, radmin), which in turn runs VMWare Console (I tend to use this as it gives me access to the host as well but I guess this is the worst performer?)
\- Remote access to the virtual machines themselves, installing the VPN client and VNC/radmin on the virtual machines (this is good but means installing more stuff on the virtual machines)
\- Installing Console on the remote machine and using it to access the server (I have tried this but not got it to work)
\- Using VNC to access the server (http://kb.vmware.com/vmtnkb/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&externalId=1246&sliceId=SAL_Public) (I've not tried this)
I'm happy enough to switch between options as required, ie the first option will always be there if I need to do stuff like start/stop the VM, install VMWare Tools, etc, so just getting good performance "using" the VM is really all I care about.
In testing I've not come to conclusive results because there's always something else using the bandwidth or clouding the results, so basically I'm after the theoretical best and/or what other people have found to be best in their experiments.