Scott's post prompted this post as I've found that unlike Scott, my recent upgrade to a third screen is really helpful. I run with two PCs under my desk. One PC is a simple Dell tower with 4GB of RAM, a dual core chip in it and a couple of SATA spindles - it's a few years old at this point I think [1]. This is what I call my personal machine - I do email, IM, and pretty much everything else on it - all my files are stored here. My second machine is a fairly high end Dell tower with dual Xeon chips, 8GB of RAM, and about 1TB of storage online in a RAID. I run a 64-bit OS on here and run numerous VMWare instances. I also have my company issued laptop on my desk sometimes sitting on the docking station when I need it for one reason or another.
On my VMWare machine, I have all of my lab and test VMs, and I also have one VM for each of my customers. By having a virtual machine for each customer, I gain a few things:
- I keep customer data separate
- My customer machines are portable - when I travel I copy the VMs I need to my laptop and I have everything I need to do work with that customer
- I can be VPN'ed into multiple customers at once
- I can run multiple types of VPN clients (right now I have four different kinds across my VMs)
Up until a couple weeks ago, I ran with two screens on my desk - Dell 19" flat panels. Each of these panels has two inputs, so, when I needed to move between machines, I would change the active input and toggle my KVM. This worked, but, it was a complete context switch. The most inconvenient thing was the lack of clipboard synchronization.
About a year ago, my manager was kind enough to ship me a screen that he felt I should have for my desk, and I left it in the box as I didn't really have a use for it. I discovered this program called Multiplicity the other day which basically acts as a KVM over the network. Multiplicity gave me a reason to unbox my third screen and connect it. I now have my screens arranged horizontally in the following fashion:
A B C
Screens are connected in the following fashion:
Screen | Input | Machine |
A | 1 | Personal |
B | 1 | Personal |
2 | VMWare | |
C | 1 | VMWare |
I have Multiplicity installed as a "server" on my personal machine, and as a "client" on my VMWare machine. Now, whenever I move my mouse to the edge of screen B, it jumps to screen C which is actually physically wired to the VMWare machine. The only time I use my KVM now is if I need to do something in text mode (e.g. BIOS change or something). I also have synchronized clipboards [2]. If I upgrade to the more expensive (like $20 more) version of Multiplicity, I could even add my laptop as a client, but, I don't really have a need for that right now.
Overall, I think this new setup is great - I can bounce between tasks in a much smoother fashion now and it's just generally more convenient. This is what it looks like:
[1] I actually just got a replacement personal machine as Dell had a refurb Quad Core w/ 4GB going for ~$600 the other day. I haven't put it into production yet but I am planning to run Windows Server 2008 x64 on it now.
[2] I run so many applications that play in this space that my clipboard chain is seemingly broken half the time so this has some limited value
You could also use synergy. It is free and does the same thing.