Navigating nested RDP sessions

Often at work I have to RDP into one server in order to get to another. And no, there's no chance of the network getting sorted out such that I can connect to all machines directly :)

I'm wondering if anyone has any good tips/tricks for working in this scenario. I tend to open RDP sessions full screen, so the way to get back to my desktop is to click the minimize or restore buttons on the toolbar the drops down from the top of the screen when you are using a full-screen RDP session. The problem is that when you log into A and then from there log into B, A's toolbar covers B's, so there's no easy way to get back to the desktop of A without logging out of B. At least as far as I can see. Maybe there's a keyboard shortcut that can pop you out of the innermost session?

At the moment, I try to not use full screen mode on the nested session, but apart from having to remember to set that before I connect, it reduces the workspace and is something I'd like to avoid.

3 Answers

Uncheck the pin on the "outer" RDP's toolbar to hide it. You can still get to it if necessary (hold the mouse against the edge of the screen), and any inner RDP connection toolbars will be visible.

Alternatively, other RDP clients such as Remote Desktop Manager might have a different toolbar when you run them full screen, so you'll know the custom toolbar is for the outer connection and the standard toolbars are inner connections.

Edit: Microsoft Remote Desktop Client 7.0 allows you to move the RDP toolbar from side to side by dragging it. You can move the outer toolbar to the side so you can tell it apart from the others.

I generally try to set the "inner" session's resolution to something slightly less than the outer RDP's "fullscreen" size. That negates the overlapping RDP command tabs at the top, and the aggravation of competing task bars that may or may not be set to Autohide (or worse, both set to not Autohide, leaving one forver hidden.)

Once I have the settings the way I want for the inner one I just save a .RDP with the dimensions I want, ensuring I don't have to twiddle manually every time I connect.

Unpin the Connection Bar of Outer RDP session. Connect to another Remote Desktop within outer RDP.

Now if you want to switch back to outer RDP session, when you navigate to top of Inner RDP session you will see connection bar of Outer Session (not inner).

Just hold left mouse button and drag the connection bar of outer RDP session to the left or right, now you can see the connection of inner session.

Now, pin the connection bar of inner RDP session of better navigation between those nested RDP sessions.