I've Mac OS X (El Capitan) VMs in ESXi 6 on our local network that I can SSH into and I can VNC into and I can connect Xamarin Mac Agent to but I can't Remote Desktop Connection (Windows 10) into. Our developers are all on Windows but need access to the Mac VMs for cross-platform development, particularly viewing the iOS Simulator.
How do you set up a vanilla Mac OS X install to enable remoting into it with Windows Remote Desktop Connection?
Best Answer
It's your virtualization software that provides the RDP server, not OS X itself.
I don't know what you are using specifically, so I will frame my answer using VirtualBox as the example. However, the principle is basically the same.
On my FreeBSD VM that I have running on my iMac (10.11.5), I have the option to turn on Remote Display as well as configure which port it connects to as well as how I authenticate to the display server.
In this case, VirtualBox uses the RDP protocol, so you can have any RDP client, whether it's Windows or OS X or even Linux connect to this particular VM.
There is nothing that I have to do to the OS running in the VM instance to connect. Infact, the connection will remain persistent across reboots so you can in fact issue a
shutdown -r nowcommand and watch it go through the whole process.