VMware View

This morning I’ve recorded a real cool VMware View 4 PCoIP demo delivered by Willem van Engeland. In this demo Willem shows what impact a limited bandwidth of 5Mb/s and 1Mb/s can have on the performance of your view virtual desktop. The great part is that he switched back and forth between the RDP protocol and the PCoIP protocol. This way you get a real good comparison between both protocols and you can see how PCoIP improves the video quality even though the bandwidth is limited. The video is presented in the Dutch language and the audio quality is poor but take a peek at it, it’s really great stuff.

Azlan has invited me to attend the “VMware View 4 launch event”. This morning I charged my camcorder and drove up to “De Olifant” in Breukelen. After the opening speech presented by Robert Snel and a market overview of desktop virtualization, VMware’s System Engineer Ton Hermes delivered a real good session called “What’s new in the View 4 Solution”.

    

After a short break Willem van Engeland did a real cool live demo of View 4. The morning ended with a POC and a wrap-up session followed by a good lunch. During this event I’ve shot some pictures and have captured 10 minutes of video footage.  I’ve also recorded Willem's complete View 4 demo with my Flip.

  

This cool video was taken at the French VMware User Group meeting last Thursday. It shows VMware's bare metal view (client) hypervisor running on a laptop.

Introducing VMware View 4, the industry’s first purpose built solution for delivering desktops as a managed service.

Download VMware View 4

http://downloads.vmware.com/d/info/desktop_downloads/vmware_view/4_0

@herrod: Launch of VMware View 4 - see the new videos & info: http://www.vmware.com/products/view/

VMware View PCoIP display protocol provides a superior end-user experience over any network. Adaptive technology ensures an optimized virtual desktop delivery on both the LAN and the WAN. Address the broadest list of use cases and deployment options with a single protocol. Access personalized virtual desktops complete with applications and end-user data and settings anywhere and anytime with VMware View.

Need complete access to your PC or virtual machine from the palm of your hand? With Wyse PocketCloud™, it's no problem! From the leader in thin-computing, PocketCloud allows you to view and manage your PC and your virtual Windows desktop anytime and anywhere on your iPhone or iPod touch.

VMware View 3.1 Certified

Support for:

•Direct connections and advanced tunneling
•SSL encryption
•Experimental support for RSA Two-Factor Authentication

http://www.wyse.com/products/software/pocketcloud/

DinamiQs developed a compeling VDi solution that enables system administrators to manage thousands of VDi desktops within one single management console. If you want to deploy one or 100.000 clients? Virtual Storm will manage it for you.

Full software management through Active Directory enables you to keep track on licenses, saving tremendous amounts of money, every day again.

• Scale from 1 to 100,000 clients
• Out Perform end user expectations
• Reduce Entire IT Environment Requirements to absolute minimum
• Secure your data- beyond military grade security
• Save on all levels-hardware, licenses, bandwidth, power, administration, support, maintenance
• Simplify installation, management and applications
• Attain 98+% Application Compatibility and Interoperability
• Improve your bottom line, ROI in 6 months or less, then see real savings
• Experience the scalability, performance and cost savings only available through DinamiQs

Here’s the a Dutch spoken video showing Virtual Storm in action managing desktops hosted on vSphere 4. The demo is presented by Mike Jansen. Continue reading "Demo Video of DinamiQs ... »

This evening I attended a Dutch VMUG meeting hosted by Sun Microsystems in Amersfoort. As usual I was able to collect some video footage. The speakers at this mini event were Viktor van den Berg, Jaap Romers, Sander van der Post and Mike Jansen. They delivered a good show.

I had the opportunity to see a great demo of the Sun Ray Connector for VMware View Manager. It connects users of Sun Ray clients to Windows virtual machines via the VMware View Manager. It provides a Sun Ray kiosk session that allows users to connect to their virtual machines. The kiosk session prompts the user for their Active Directory user name and password. Then the user is shown a list of available desktops, or is logged directly into their desktop, if there is only one available. The user does not have to enter their password again at the Windows login.

Liquidware Labs announced the availability of Stratusphere(TM) 4.2, a software solution delivering focused visibility into network, user, application, and desktop activity dramatically reducing the technical and financial risks associated with migrating to VDI.

"Our irrefutable method of measuring Network User Application Response Time (nuART(TM)) is extremely relevant in gauging potential VDI candidates and user experience," said David Bieneman CEO of Liquidware Labs. "Stratusphere further excels by combining these metrics to create a VDI Fit(TM) and VDI UX(TM) rating identifying good, fair and poor candidates for VDI and providing a measurement to gauge and keep user experience at a constant."

Continue reading "David Bieneman and Tyler ... »

This is a demo video of the $99.95 MicroClient TC. The MicroClient TC is a 300 Mhz ARM 9 based thin client that comes with the complete Quick RDP software that automatically boots into a Windows Terminal Session on a Windows 2003 or 2008 server. It can also be used with Windows XP hosted on a VMware server. Wouldn’t it be great if the VMware View Client is supported on this device?

Installing and configuring VMware Workstation, VMware ThinApp, and creating a ThinApp Packaged Application in a 20 minute video.

VMware ThinApp From Start to Finish in 20 Minutes - Part 2 of 2

During the delivery of my VMware View training I experienced a nasty error. It took me a while before I figured out what caused it. When you’re adding a vCenter server to the Connection server you have the option to enable the Composer. Before enabling the Composer you have to install the Composer software on the vCenter server. After activating the enable mark box, you must add a Domain administrator account. When I added an account, the following error showed up in the event log of the vCenter server.

Bad domain name. com.vmware.vdi.admin.ui.VCBean.a(SourceFile:1002)
AxisFault
faultCode: {http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/}Client
faultString: VMware.Sim.Fault.AdHostsUnavailableFault
{http://vmware.com/SviService}AdHostUnavailableFault:<AdConfigId i:nil="true"/>

After trying a lot of different things, I finally ended up with two solutions, the hard way is remove your vCenter server from the AD Domain and let it rejoin the AD Domain again. The easy way is add an AD Domain record to your DNS server. Quick and dirty, open your DNS manager, add an A record, don’t fill in the host name and just hit OK. After that, it works like a charm.

The past few weeks I’ve been trying to setup a VMware View lab. Time after time I received the same error. The Connection server reported, “Waiting for agent” in the Global desktop and pool view / Desktop Sources tab. This error was caused by the DHCP server running on my internet router.

Finally, after reading the install guide I decided to create a dedicated AD,DHCP and DNS server for the View desktops. VMware View has several requirements in the way Active Directory must be configured:

• An Active Directory integrated dynamic DNS
• A reverse lookup zone
• An integrated DHCP server
• All virtual desktops must be members of the domain.
• The VDM Connection Server must be a member of the domain.

I created an internal only switch and connected the Connection server, the VDI Desktops and the one virtual NIC of the vCenter server. The error disappeared and I’m able to log on to my virtual desktops. 

Lessons learned:

• VMware View requires Active Directory.
• Best practice: Assign a separate domain (or at least a separate OU) for a VDM environment.
• Best practice: Install your domain controller / DNS server / DHCP server inside a virtual machine.
• Configure DNS with a reverse lookup zone.
• Configure DHCP to automatically register computers and PTR records.

View Manager 3.0.1 includes the following enhancements:

• Integrates the ThinPrint Virtual Channel Gateway module so that View deployments can communicate with ThinPrint server. Important: ThinPrint's .print engine for VMware View must be installed on the target print server prior to installing View 3.0.1. Print jobs originating from virtual machines are subject to different licensing criteria on ThinPrint server. In order to provide the print server with information about the origin of a print request, View uses the TPVCGateway module as the print provider.

Continue reading "What's New in View Manager ... »

Belgian/Dutch reference case showing the unique benefits of a virtual desktop (VMware View) combined with the special Ultra Thinclients from SUN Microsystems.