Remote desktop connection

This guide is specific for users of Windows images. Connecting to a Linux desktop remotely will funktion analogously, just that the server side setup will of course be different.

You can upload your own Windows images to the HPC cloud or request access to the Windows 10 Professional image we have set up. When creating your own image be aware that windows does not come with drivers that can handle the devices provided by the cloud infrastructure. Working windows drivers for these devices are provided by the Fedora Project’s virtIO driver disk.

Connecting

After booting a Windows Instance you can interact with it through the console interface provided by OpenStack. You can get the URL of the console with:

INSTANCE_NAME="myWin"
openstack server create "$INSTANCE_NAME" --image "Windows 10 Pro" --flavor mpcdf.medium --network cloud-local-2
openstack console url show "$INSTANCE_NAME" --novnc -c url -f value

and connecting the the resulting URL with your browser or by clicking on the instance in the dashboard and selecting the console tab.

Use this console for the initial configuration of the Windows instance.

Remote Desktop

You can configure Windows to provide a remote desktop separate from the OpenStack console. Microsoft provide detailed documentation, here just a summary:

• go to Start > Settings > System > Remote Desktop

• enable the slider

Virtual Network Computing (VNC)

You can of course also install a VNC server on the machine. Then the ports will work slightly differently. Authentication will slightly differ a bit too.

Permitting External Access

By default the remote desktop is available at port 3389, create a security group allowing traffic to this port from the gateway machines: gate1 has address 130.183.12.24 and gate2.mpcdf.mpg.de has address 130.183.12.25. Here is how this could be done with the command line:

INSTANCE_NAME="myWin"
SECGROUP_NAME="Allow RDP from the gateways"
openstack security group create "$SECGROUP_NAME"
openstack security group rule create "$SECGROUP_NAME" --dst-port 3389 --protocol tcp --remote-ip 130.183.12.16/28 --description "Allow RDP from the gateways"
openstack server add security group "$INSTANCE_NAME" "$SECGROUP_NAME"

Look up your instance IP address from the dashboard or with:

o server show $INSTANCE_NAME -c addresses -f value

Then establish an ssh connection through the gateways:

ssh -f -N -L 4321:IP:3389 gate2

You can now connect to the Windows machine by pointing your remote desktop client to localhost:4321.