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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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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Using Windows Integrated Authentication with VMware App Volumes

CloudVolumes-SquareLast week on Twitter Jason Shiplett (Blog/Twitter) raised the question about configuring VMware App Volumes to use Windows Integrated Authentication when connecting to the backend SQL database. While this is supported in App Volumes the documentation (v2.6 of the User Guide located HERE) doesn’t mention the “How” of setting this up. Now usually this isn’t much of a challenge if using using/requiring Windows Integrated Authentication for SQL connectivity, you simple create or use an existing Active Directory user account with the needed SQL permissions to make the connection. Easy peasy.

Well, for App Volumes if it was that straight forward there would be no need for a blog post. Smile When running through the App Volumes Manager installation (documented HERE) when you get to the “Database Server’’  dialog you will notice the two SQL authentication methods. But pay close attention to the Windows Integrated Authentication option, the key here is the mention of “automatically use this server’s SYSTEM account”  and no ability to specify an actual user account as you would normally see:

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VMware App Volumes with RDSH and Horizon View 6

CloudVolumes-Square

Some of my favorite things seem to go better when paired, peanut butter and chocolate, hamburgers and French fries, and VMware App Volumes and Horizon View 6.x. Over the last month or so I have written several posts covering the use of App Volumes and mostly demoed that using my Horizon View lab environment with floating non-persistent desktops.

In this post we are going to switch gears a bit and focus on a feature that was made available with View 6.0, support for application delivery via Microsoft Remote Desktop Services Host or RDSH in short. This was a welcome edition to View to attempt feature parity with offerings from Citrix. But managing a farm of installed RDSH applications can be both a bore and a chore.

Well with App Volumes we can limit some of the overhead in managing those applications with the use of  App Volumes AppStacks. Leveraging AppStacks allows you to update user applications in one location and deliver the update to many RDSH servers. The concept and setup is very straight forward, though the configuration for RDSH servers is lacking from the VMware App Volumes product documentation.

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