Setting a display topology at VM boot time with VMware Tools

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

This article describes how to set a display topology at VM boot time, for VMs running a Windows guest OS (Windows 7 and above). This can be used for multimon testing when the host only has a single monitor.

Note: The bootTopology option works for VMTools 11.1.0 and above.

Environment

VMware Tools 11.x

Resolution

1. To set a display topology at boot, specify the screen sizes and positions with the guestInfo.svga.wddm.bootTopology VMX config option.

For a single screen:

guestInfo.svga.wddm.bootTopology="1600x1200"

For multiple screens, separate the screens with commas or spaces, and specify their positions as absolute coordinates. When setting a multimon topology, there may be a delay of a few seconds after logging in before the new topology is set. If the topology is not changed, subsequent boots will use the requested boot topology immediately.

guestInfo.svga.wddm.bootTopology="1600x1200+0+0 1200x1600+1600+0 3840x2160+2800+0"
 

The requested topology will be set at each VM boot, but it can still be changed while the VM is running, ie to enter fullscreen view mode, or using autofit, or using VMwareResolutionSet.exe. Please see Increasing virtual machine display resolution to a custom resolution beyond the maximum resolution listed in Microsoft Windows .

If the requested topology is not set, check the vmware.log for error messages. When successfully applied, the vmware.log should contain a line like:

Guest: vm3d: Using bootTopology: 1600x1200+0+0 1200x1600+1600+0 3840x2160+2800+0

2. To restrict a VM to the requested display topology, specify the bootTopology VMX config as above, and add the "modeset disable" config see How to disable display resolution setting through VMware Tools .

guestInfo.svga.wddm.modeset="FALSE"

In this configuration it is also recommended to set the following VMX config which will remove non-matching modes from the Windows mode list (and decrease the chances of an intermediate or fallback mode being used that is not listed in the bootTopology).

guestInfo.svga.wddm.restrictModesToBootTopology="TRUE"