Accessing your desktop with HP ZCentral Remote Boost

If you have a HP Z-class desktop or mobile workstation, you have access to a HP’s proprietary Z Central Remote Boost (formerly known as RGS). It allows you to access your HP workstation from virtually anywhere, as long as you can access your office network via VPN.

This can be a solution allowing you to work from home, accessing your work machine from virtually any PC. HP indicates that each session requires between 3-5 Mbps and your latency (ping time) to the desktop machine should be less than 200ms.

To get this running, you’ll need to:

1. Download and install Sender application on your HP workstation. You can download it from this link.
2. Download and install the Receiver application on your remote machine. You can download it from this link. This does not need to be a HP machine, and does not require a license.
3. Make sure you have a VPN connection to your office network (RGS uses port 42966 by default).

Once this is established, you can run the HP RGS Receiver application on your remote machine.

You’ll be prompted to enter the hostname of your HP Z workstation:

Then prompted with Windows login information:

After that, you can control your HP Z workstation directly. This video is a real-time screen recording of my colleague accessing a HP Z2-mini located here in Perth (WA), from his home in Newcastle (NSW). In the recording, you can see him manipulate an Inventor model and perform various functions.

In terms of the bandwidth and latency during this test, SpeedTest.net indicates: