Yesterday a customer asked me how to use Windows roaming profiles just on the virtual desktops and not on the local desktops from which the user is connecting. Those local desktops are also a member of the Active Directory and the connecting user has a profile path configured in his user setting within the Active Directory.

Contrary to popular belief, you don’t actually need vCenter and ESX(i) to use View. If you want to utilize VMs from other platforms as your desktops you need to change one thing when installing the agent onto those VMs.

Running Novell eDirectory with view is problematic and not supported. However here is how you do it if you feel so inclined. I would like to thank a very good customer of mine, Carl Hooker for helping me solve this riddle in his environment.

The hostname naming conventions in companies are very different and mostly the come from the early days of IT. In banks for example often they are using a prefix or suffix with an increasing number. With VMware View it’s possible to use naming patterns to customize the hostname. By default the prefix can be up to 13 characters in length and some numeric suffix is appended to that in order to distinguish each desktop from others in the pool.

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.

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.