I don't know even if I put the question right, but here's what I'd like to accomplish. I have avoided specifying exact Vmware virtualization product here because I'm not sure which one would be most suitable for the task at hand.
I am developing an application that works in local network. This application has to run on several computers at the same time, and it's important to me, as a developer and tester, to see (literally) how it behaves at all times on all computers.
Is there any way to connect to screens of virtual machines deployed on ESX, ESXi, Sever 2.0, or some other product, so that I can see something like grid of screens, say 4x4 or 6x4 or whatever number of scaled screens, at the same time? Ability to interact with screens directly from grid (by double-clicking a screen, for instance, and then getting full resolution screen) would be greatly appreciated, of course.
I hope that someone understood what I meant here. :)
ESXi allows you to open multiple consoles and you can control them from there.
Alternatively if you find a good VNC or RDP client that you can tile and arrange to your preference, you can just run those on the virtual machines and connect from your management computer.
There are pay-for products like Vision from Master Solution that is meant to control and monitor computer labs that will "Grid" and control remote systems. This may be closer to the kind of control you're looking for, but like I said you pay for it and you install a small client on each system you wish to monitor.
I think this tool is the best one for what you are trying to do, free from VMware: VMware Guest Console
http://labs.vmware.com/flings/vgc
It allows you to do what you want nicely in terms of tiling multiple guest consoles (Under Virtual Machine Menu), and allows you to issue commands against multiple VMs, view and kill processes, and other mass operations as well which is pretty nice.
ESX/i lets you have lots of consoles to VMs open at any time, you'd have to move them around to create the tile effect you mention but yes you can do that. You can click on any specific console to control it but the resolution won't change (not for ESX/i anyway, it will for Server/Workstation/Fusion).
Not sure about VMWare but VirtualBox bundles a RDP service that can be enabled for each VM.
You can then launch a rdesktop viewer for each of the required VMs and leverage your desktop manager (eg: Compiz/Fusion) for the tiling and click to maximize effects.
I like to use vFoglight to monitor our virtual environment. http://www.vizioncore.com/products/vFoglight/
The product does cost but it is pretty nice. I can watch the performance many VMs/hosts all at the same time and even be notified via email if one of them fires off an alarm (a performance hit).
You can setup custom dashboards to watch almost any aspect of a VMs performance. Also, as long as your Foglight box is up you can view history up to the full life of a VM.
A couple of exerts from the literature:
-Capacity Planning - Plan, manage and optimize infrastructure capacity for improved performance and better resource utilization. -Resource Utilization Management - Identify underutilized capacity and predict overutilization of resources for future planning. -Guest Process Investigation - Drill-down into the processes running within virtual machines to understand internal performance and resource utilization.