Getting Started with Horizon View Instant Clones

ViewWith the release of Horizon View 7 a few months back, I have been wanting to get some hands on time with the new version and some of its cool fea犀利士
tures. And for cool features, nothi犀利士
ng (in this release) gets better then the Instant Clone technology. If you are unfamiliar with Instant Clones, Horizon View 7 is first product to leverage VMware’s VMFork technology (details HERE) and in very short terms allows for the creation of new desktops in SECONDS! This is a beautiful thing, especially if you have any long term stick time with View Composer and the pro/cons that come along with it.

But while all this is good news, it might not be good news for many. The Instant Clone feature is only available to customers/users who sit at the highest level of Horizon View licensing, Enterprise. The Enterprise bundle is needed to really round out some of the rough edges that Instant Clones introduces. Currently Instant Clones doesn’t support VMware Persona Management, so you will need to leverage VMware UEM or VMware AppVolumes Writable Volumes to redirect/capture user data.Or if going for the “Just in Time” desktop, AppVolumes will be need for application delivery.

With that said, for those who have the licensing or just access to it in a lab environment, lets see how to setup it up and get some desktops created!

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Notes from the Field–Deploying ThinApp’s with VMware App Volumes

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CloudVolumes-SquareDuring my experience working with VDI/EUC deployments with customers one thing becomes pretty clear during engagements, it’s not necessarily about the actual desktop as much as it is about getting access to the applications that your users need and require to be productive. Over the last few years getting these applications to the end users required a couple of tricks and deployment models to present them. From a VMware View perspective initially you had two “native” options, install the needed application into your golden image or images (which lead to both image and View pool sprawl) or leverage VMware’s ThinApp product to create and isolate the applications from the underlying operating system. With ThinApp came the challenge of the application delivery; a not so robust integration  with the Horizon View Administrator console, leveraging Microsoft Group Policy setting to deploy a MSI, and finally logon scripts and file shares.

In August of 2014 VMware added an additional application strategy with its purchase of Cloud Volumes which has since been re-branded to VMware App Volumes. App Volumes leverages an application “layering” approach (similar products are available from UniDesk and LiquidWare Labs), where as the application or applications are installed into a capture virtual machine and saved as a VMDK disk (this is the lite explanation). This VMDK or “layer” can then be mounted and accessed by multiple virtual desktops for a “just in time delivery” mechanism for your application sets.

Seems like the holy grail right? Well for the most part it is, with one exception. Many organizations still have legacy applications that require a specific version of Java, or require an outdated browser such as IE6. This is the beauty of VMware ThinApp, with its ability to virtualize and isolate  applications and their dependencies from the operating system you could run multiple versions of Java on the same virtual machine. So, what do you do if you still have legacy applications that are best served being virtualized via ThinApp but you want to use the power of App Volumes to distribute them? Well, you put your ThinApp’s into App Volumes of course!

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VMware Horizon View 6.2 – View Composer & RDS Hosts

With VMworld US a few weeks behind us I finally got some time in the home lab to do some upgrades around the some of the latest software announcements. More specifically I wanted to upgrade my Horizon View environment to the newly released 6.2 version. If you happened to miss the announcements Brian Suhr ( blog / twitter ) has a great recap post located HERE and the VMware release notes are located HERE.

For this post I wanted to focus on what I believe is one of the cooler features related to this release, the support for View Composer/linked clones for the deployment and configuration of RDSH servers. While RDSH has been supported since the initial release of Horizon View 6.x, the creation and management of the host servers fell to the traditional one to one server management lifecycle. A little cumbersome for those looking to deploy and manage large farms.  With the inclusion of support for linked-clones Horizon View now supports the same one to many deployment option that we have been used to for desktops. Create a single golden image and off to the races.

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Notes From the Field–VSAN Deployment and Licensing

clip_image001For today’s post I am happy to have guest blogger Bruce Henderson (Twitter). Bruce and I worked together on one of our first customer VSAN deployments (this post has been in draft status for a bit) and  captured a few “gotcha’s” that we stumbled across along the way. More importantly this post coincides with a great post by Tom Howarth (Blog/Twitter) around challenges with VSAN licensing a last week that caught my eye, that post is located here.

Without further ado, a VSAN deployment in Bruce’s own words….

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