AFAIK, Windows Remote Desktop always renders through virtual display adapter devices, though it can optionally make use of GPU resources to accelerate rendering

AFAIK, Windows Remote Desktop always renders through virtual display adapter devices, though it can optionally make use of GPU resources to accelerate rendering to these devices. I just tested in an ESXi VM[1], and Windows 10 will happily boot and accept an RDP connection without any (virtual) display hardware at all: https://jasomill.at/HeadlessRDP.png https://jasomill.at/HeadlessRDP.png Whether a particular computer will boot Windows without display hardware depends on the firmware — in my experience, some workstations will, some won't, and I honestly haven't seen a modern x86 server without some sort of integrated graphics to support out-of-band management, often with a VGA port as the only physical video output. [1] By hand-editing the VM's .vmx configuration file, setting svga.present = "FALSE" and adding the undocumented option hwm.svga.notAlwaysPresent = "TRUE" Interesting aside: I figured this out by running "strings" on the hypervisor executable, which turned up this suspiciously Scheme-like bit of configuration code: https://jasomill.at/vmx.ss.html#L-808 https://jasomill.at/vmx.ss.html#L-808 In fact, two definitions and a couple trivial syntax fixes are enough to get Chez Scheme to evaluate it without warnings: $ awk -f - vmx.ss <<EOF | scheme -q BEGIN { print "(define / fxdiv)" print "(define (log . args) (for-each display args))" } { gsub(/\(\)/, "'()") gsub(/ 0x/, " #x") print } EOF $ So it appears the VMware hypervisor contains an interpreter for a very Scheme-like dialect of Lisp.