VMRC - simultaneous sessions

This is fantastic. I love using the Virtual Machine Remote Console for accessing VMs running under Microsoft Virtual Server 2005, but it never dawned on me until I saw this blog entry by Peter Provost, that you could run up two instances of the VMRC client from two different machines to connect to one Virtual Machine "guest". This is great for true remote desktop sharing, which is absolutely not easy to do when connecting through NAT/firewalls/routers etc. And yes, before you ask, I have attempted this with Messenger (and failed).

Makes me wish I was doing Extreme/Pair Programming (XP) - this capability is a great enabler. Combine it with IM, VOIP, a WebCam and VPN, you truly can collaborate very effectively from anywhere.

The other things I particular like about VMRC (apart from being able to access the BIOS space which I blogged about a few days ago) is that it's light-weight in terms of screen "real-estate". I find the client in the web-based admin console a bit bloated due to the space taken up by the browser itself. VMRC is minimalist in this respect. Don't forget, you can also maximise the screen with the Host-Key+Enter sequence, so the experience ends up just like a maximised RDP session - except that multiple users can join the party.

Next stop is to find some sort of analysis comparing the merits of the VMRC, RDP and "Messenger" protocols, all of which provide very similar functionality. Is one any more efficient than the other in terms of compression/throughput? If anyone has any links or info on this, please let me know.