Great article from Ian Gibbs, a former VMware PSO consultant on yellow-bricks.com. Ian is responsible for delivering a 3000 user virtual desktop infrastructure in his new role. For this project he redesigned the storage layout this week.

Login scripts are very important to administrators because they can manage to connect network drives, printers ,do personalization of user session and a lot more. But what, if the user just reconnects after an RDP disconnect? In bank environments i.e. the users are working with hot desks very often where they disconnect a session move to another office or desk and just reconnect their session again.

When browsing the file system on the View connection server you’ll find four ADM files in the server’s program files directory: C:\Program Files\VMware View\Server\Extras\GroupPolicyFiles. With those files you can easily manage the View Server, View Client and View agent configuration settings.

There is a new  beta version of the View Open Client available for download at the Google Code community. One of the new features is smart card support. To allow that you’ve to copy your PKCS#11 modules in /usr/lib/vmware/view/pkcs11 and use Rdesktop version 1.5.0 as minimum. A detailed description can be found in the readme.txt file within the download package.

The View client can be installed in two ways. You can do a normal GUI based install what means that you click through the installation wizard or you can do a scripted or silent installation. The silent or scripted View Client installation can be personalized with loads of MSI parameters. Some of them are standard MSI, some of them are specific.

The View Composer brings the linked clone technology to the View solution. Due to that the environment will need less storage for the virtual desktops. Form a technical View the Parent VM and the Snapshot will be combined as one VM or Entity. The virtual machine will be protected from deleting in the vCenter due to different linked clones a referencing to it.

With VMware View 3 and the View Composer it is possible to create automated desktop pools using the linked clone technology and saving storage through that. Within the configuration you can directly set an organizational unit in the Active Directory for the desktops in the automated desktop pool.

Loads of companies are using proxy servers to fasten or reduce web traffic and of course fo more other reason. When a proxy server is configured within the Windows/Internet Explorer settings this proxy server will also be used by the View client. This is good as long as the connection or security server is on the web and not in the LAN. But what if the server is on the local area network?

Since Virtual Desktop Manager 2.1 the VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure got a default setting which blocks direct RDP connections to the virtual desktops. When a user tries to connect to the desktop with a standard Microsoft RDP client he will get a message stating: Access denied. In case that there was a requirement for connections from non-View/VDM clients the administartor needed to change a registry parameter to enable the access.

With VMware View and RDP the administrator can redirect the client drives to the virtual desktop through a standard RDP function. The client drives are connected as network drives. Without any additional configuration all local client drives will be redirected to the virtual desktop.