The way I prefer to run Guake is to run a different Guake for each important server that I use a lot. If I use three servers quite frequently, I have three Guake sessions running.

Hotkeys

The first Guake session gets assigned to F12, the second to F11, the third to F10, and so on.

The fullscreen hotkey gets assigned to Shift+F12, Shift+F11, etc.

Background image

I use the same background image for each machine, but with a different color for each. (eg. red, green, blue)

Guake runs locally, a new connection is made for each tab

Multiple configurations

Because guake relies on gconf for its configuration, there can be normally only be one guake configuration. But that's one configuration per user. So.... I create another local user for each configuration. (this user is extraneous, but meh)

New connection for each tab

When a tab first opens, we need to create another connection. To do this, use gconf-editor to modify the value of 'default_shell'. NOTE that its value must be the FULL path to a script.

To avoid having to enter your password for each tab, you probably want to set up certificates. While you CAN do it without a passphrase, it would be a really good idea to do the ssh-agent thing.

Or: Guake runs remotely, only one connection is needed for all tabs

Guake must be installed on the far side.

Use ssh -X, etc when making the connection.

Specifically, I use this:

ssh -fX otheruser@otherhost "env TERM=$TERM guake"

The "env TERM=$TERM" part is required, because -f otherwise discards $TERM.