Increasing virtual machine display resolution to a custom resolution beyond the maximum resolution listed in Microsoft Windows

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

This article provides steps for manually setting the video display resolution in Microsoft Windows virtual machines beyond the available resolutions in Display Properties.

Symptoms:

Unable to change the screen resolution of a Microsoft Windows virtual machine beyond the maximum resolution available in Display Properties.

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 6.5.x

VMware vSphere ESXi 6.7.x  

VMware vSphere ESXi 7.0.x

 

Resolution

To resolve this issue:

1. Follow the procedure outlined in Adding video resolution modes to Windows guest operating systems.
2. Open an Administrative Command prompt and navigate to the VMware Tools Folder.

Note: The default location is %ProgramFiles%\VMware\VMware Tools.

3. Run VMwareResolution.exe to force Windows to set the desired resolution.

VMwareResolutionSet.exe Variable1 Variable2 , Variable3 Variable4 Variable5 Variable6

Variable 1 is the index of the primary monitor (Default = 0).
Variable 2 is the number of total monitors (Default = 1).
Variable 3 is the starting X position of monitor 0 (Default = 0).
Variable 4 is the starting Y position of monitor 0 (Default = 0).
Variable 5 is the width (X) of monitor 0 in pixels.
variable 6 is the width (Y) of monitor 0 in pixels.

For Example: 

To set the virtual machine display resolution to 3280 x 2048:

VMwareResolutionSet.exe 0 1 , 0 0 3280 2048

To set a virtual machine with two monitors side-by-side, one at 1920x1200 and one at 1600x1200:

VMwareResolutionSet.exe 0 2 , 0 0 1920 1200 , 1920 0 1600 1200

Additional Information