Welcome to Part 2 of the VMware Horizon Workspace installation and configuration.

Start your favorite browser and navigate to https://{configurator-va.yourcompany.com} (in my case: https://connection-va.gehring.lab)

Begin with the Setup Wizard

Paste your License Key provided by VMware and define your default admin account. The Admin account is a special account outside your active directory. If your connection to active directory gets broken you can use this account. You will also need this account accessing Horizon Workspace Administrator Web Interface.

During the next step you need to setup the database connection. For demo and PoC purposes you can use the internal Database. For production environments you will need a external database.

Horizon Workspace needs to sync user accounts with your LDAP directory service. In most customer situations Microsoft Active Directory is the primary directory to store account attributes. The following screenshot shows the LDAP settings for my home lab. For those of you who are not so familiar with LDAP, I recommend LDAP Browser. You can download a full working trial version here: http://www.ldapbrowser.com/download.htm.

Important: The Admin user you’re going to specify in Bind DN will become the Administrator for your Horizon Workspace deployment.

In the next step you need to map the LDAP user attributes to Horizon workspace. If you are using Microsoft Active Directory you should click Next.

The next screen is responsible for selecting filtered users excluding from Horizon Workspace.

Add the group information from your directory that you want to import to Horizon Workspace during the synchronization process.

Schedule a synchronization to run frequently. Wait until the sync is completed. In case of large enterprise the synchronization could take a a few minutes.

The Setup wizards displays the SSL certificate and the private key for external access service. Copy and Paste the certificates for later usage.

Enable the modules you’d like to offer to your users. Conduct the Admin Guide for detailed informations about the module.

Now you can access the Horizon Workspace using username and password to verify the initial configuration.

It seems that VMware has published the first release of Horizon Mobile yesterday. Follow the link below to find the release notes and a download via MyVMware. The release includes three main products: VMware Horizon Mobile Manager, VMware Base Workspace Image and the VMware Switch application.

With VMware Horizon Mobile you can securely provision and manage corporate mobile workspaces on Android based smartphones. The solution offers you a dual-persona for splitting business and private data and helps the enterprise to establish employee-owned mobile devices.

Image source: https://www.vmware.com/files/images/screens_mobile/vmw-hrzn-mble-arch-dgrm-800×600.jpg

With the VMware Horizon Mobile Manager enterprises can take control of the mobile ecosystem, manage the virtual machine with the business relevant data, get statistics and provision software to their company phones.

Image source: https://www.vmware.com/files/images/screens_mobile/ViewWorkloads-800×600.jpg

Please visit the VMware website for more information: http://www.vmware.com/products/desktop_virtualization/mobile/overview.html

This release delivers a solution for Android phones but back at VMworld 2012 VMware already introduced VMware Horizon Mobile for iOS. It will be interesting times!

Link: https://www.vmware.com/support/horizon_mobile/doc/horizon-mobile-12-release-notes.html (Release Notes)

MyVMware: https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/details?downloadGroup=MVP_HMM_120&productId=262&rPId=3096#product_downloads

Just before VMworld 2009 in Europe VMware acquired Trango, a company which developed a hypervisor for mobile phones. A year after they came up with Horizon Mobile aka MVP which is a Tier 2 hypervisor based on Android which makes it possible to run a second Android instance in a virtual machine. A great solution for companies who think about BYOD for their employees but with a restriction: The device must run Android! Today there was a new video published on Youtube which shows the Horizon Mobile solution for iOS the first time. Check this out – Awesome!

Yesterday Telefonica has launched a new service which is based on VMware’s Horizon Mobile technology. With Dual Persona, Telefonica offers a solution where the enduser can have two personas, a private and a business one on their Android based smartphone. For more information about the new service, please check the following blog post.

We think it’s a major endorsement of our EUC strategy, that two of the world’s biggest mobile players, Telefonica and Samsung (who are launching Android devices designed to support Dual Persona), are using Horizon to support and solve the issue of EUC. You can read more about the background to the deal in Alfonso Ramirez’s post from VMworld Europe, and for a demonstration of Horizon in action why not check out this video.

Link: http://www.vmwareemeablog.com/uk/live-from-mwc-telefonica-launches-new-dual-persona-service-powered-by-vmware-horizon-mobile