• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

  • Home
  • ESXTOP
  • Stickers/Shirts
  • Privacy Policy
  • About
  • Show Search
Hide Search

Repeated characters when typing in your VMs remote console?

Duncan Epping · Nov 14, 2011 ·

Today I was working on a couple of test scenarios in a remote lab. For some reason the latency was a lot higher than normal and I was very difficult to type anything in the Remote Console through the vCenter Client. Every single character I tried popped up 2 or 3 times… which makes it very difficult to type a password as you can imagine. I knew I read a KB article about this exact problem a long time ago. Considering it is KB 196 I probably wasn’t the first to bump in to this. The solution is fairly simple:

  • Power off the VM
  • Edit Settings
  • Click the Options Tab
  • Click “General”
  • Click “Configuration Parameters”
  • Click “Add Row”
  • Enter the name: keyboard.typematicMinDelay
  • Enter the value: 2000000

Although the KB article doesn’t mention it, this also applies to vSphere 5.0.

Related

Server, Various 5, 5.0, troubleshooting, VMware, vSphere

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Steve Bryen says

    14 November, 2011 at 22:11

    Hi Duncan,

    Thanks for this. I am finding that this is even worse in vCloud Director Web consoles. Especially since the vCD 1.5 release, and the newer console. I actually am finding myself going back into vSphere Client and opening the console from there which is generally more responsive (Luckily I am the Admin 🙂 )

    Do you know if this fix will also apply to vCD Web Consoles?

    Thanks

  2. Manish says

    14 November, 2011 at 23:21

    The link to KB 196 leads to the following

    http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2010/05/27/kb-article-1020524-tps-and-nehalem/

  3. Duco Jaspars says

    15 November, 2011 at 12:41

    I discussed this with several PM’s in the past, but this reminds me of a feature request to come up with a way to influence the way a vmx file is created. I would love to make an addition like this once in vCenter, to make sure that every new deployed VM has this setting correct (same with enable copy/past for instance) So something like a master vmx or blueprint vmx file.
    At this moment I can only create a template with the correct settings, to propagate to all VM’s deployed from this template.

    My 2 cents

  4. Dean Colpitts says

    16 November, 2011 at 04:35

    Holy crap – if this works, sweeeeeeeet!!!! Obviously I haven’t tried it yet. It looks like the configuartion will be a pain in the but though. We typically access our client’s remote vCenter boxes via RDP from our own Citrix XenApp 6.5 farm over VPN, and this issue is really, really, prevalent when RDPing into the vCenter server and opening a VM remote console (via a published desktop).

    Thanks for pointing out the resolution.

    dcc

    • Duncan Epping says

      16 November, 2011 at 10:00

      I have 700ms+ latency and it works like a charm here 🙂

  5. Kevin Martin says

    7 August, 2013 at 15:56

    I’ve added this configuration parameter and then built a template, but when I deploy a new VM from the template the parameter is lost. Any idea why this does not carry over to the new VM?

Primary Sidebar

About the author

Duncan Epping is a Chief Technologist in the Office of CTO of the Cloud Platform BU at VMware. He is a VCDX (# 007), the author of the "vSAN Deep Dive", the “vSphere Clustering Technical Deep Dive” series, and the host of the "Unexplored Territory" podcast.

Upcoming Events

May 24th – VMUG Poland
June 1st – VMUG Belgium
Aug 21st – VMware Explore
Sep 20th – VMUG DK
Nov 6th – VMware Explore
Dec 7th – Swiss German VMUG

Recommended Reads

Sponsors

Want to support Yellow-Bricks? Buy an advert!

Advertisements

Copyright Yellow-Bricks.com © 2023 · Log in