Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Repeated characters when typing in your VMs remote console?

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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.

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Comments

  1. 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

  3. 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. 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

  5. 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?