Archive for the ‘Horizon’ tag
Link: Managing ThinApp Packages with Horizon Workspace
Great job by Barry Coombs! Yesterday he’s published a brilliant article about managing VMware ThinApp applications with VMware Horizon Workspace. His article gives you a great overview on how preparing and integrating ThinApp packages.
Link: http://virtualisedreality.com/2013/03/03/managing-thinapp-packages-with-horizon-workspace/
Horizon Upgrade path – Overview with SKUs
I’ve put a graphic together with the SKU’s needed to upgrade your VMware EUC products to Horizon. These information is taken from the VMware price list.
No guarantee for completeness or correctness. 
As already mentioned in many blog posts out there, the EOA products are not going End of Life! They’re just going off the price list as a standalone SKU. ThinApp will live in View, Mirage and Workspace, Horizon Mobile and Application Manager are going into the Horizon Workspace SKU.
References:
Installing VMware Horizon Workspace Part 2
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.
Storage Optimization with VMware Horizon View
Great article on storage optimization technologies for VMware from VMware Product Management. Learn more about VMware View Replica Tiering, View Storage Acceleration, View Composer API for Array Integration (VCAI) and space efficient virtual disks.
Properly designing and sizing storage is key to successfully deploying virtual desktops. Transitioning from pilot to production is completely dependent on getting both the storage design and sizing right. If you get this wrong- you will negatively affect user experience, application responsiveness and your cost per desktop.
So how do you get it right?
Well ultimately you will need to ensure that your VDI environment is designed to support adequate capacity and performance. Translating a physical laptop/desktop environment to a desktop VM typically requires about 40GB of storage capacity and 15 to 200 IOPS . In addition, the IO pattern is made up of steady state events during which it is dominated by small block random writes and highly correlated peak events which can be dominated by either reads or writes. These shifts complicate storage sizing and design for VDI.
Link: http://blogs.vmware.com/euc/2013/02/storage-optimization-with-vmware-horizon-view.html
Accelerating VDI with Cisco UCS and VMware Horizon View
A few days ago VMware announced the new vFast Track Reference Architecture. With several storage appliance vendors they’ve designed a cost-effective and scalable solution for VDI deployments. Yesterday VMware and Cisco announced a new joint bundling of there solution called Cisco UCS SmartPlay with VMware Horizon View.
New Discounted Bundles
The Cisco UCS and Horizon View SmartPlay bundle is a convenient single-SKU that combines Cisco UCS and VMware Horizon in an attractively discounted bundle. This SmartPlay Starter Configuration includes:
- (2) UCS 6248UP Fabric Interconnects
- (1) UCS Chassis w/ two 2208 FEX
- (1) UCS B200 M3 Management Blade
- (3) UCS B200 M3 Desktop Workload Blades
- (300) View licenses
Expansion Bundles for additional users, and upgrade options for server-based storage are also available.
To read the full article, please visit the VMware blog.
Link: http://blogs.vmware.com/euc/2013/02/accelerating-vdi-with-cisco-ucs-and-vmware-horizon-view.html
Installing VMware Horizon Workspace Part 1
Before deploying Horizon Workspace ensure that you have a minimum of 6GB RAM and 32GB Storage available. You may need additional storage for the data appliance.
Create DNS Records
An IP address with reverse lookup (PTR) and a DNS entry must be available for each virtual appliance. I am using Microsoft DNS on my Windows 2008R2 Active Directory Controller in my lab. Create a new A records in your forward lookup zone for each virtual appliance.
Note: Mark the “Create associated pointer (PTR) record” to create a linked PTR record in your Reverse Lookup Zone.
Check you newly created DNS configuration using nslookup.
Note: DNS must be working properly, otherwise the configuration will fail !
Create Resource and IP Pool
Create a new Resource Pool using vSphere Client. If not already available, you need to create a new IP Pool. Ensure that your DNS configuration matches with the IP Pools properties.
Deploy Horizon Workspace
Horizon Workspace is OVA packaged as a multi-virtual machine vApp. It can be directly deployed to VMware vCenter. The vApp includes five virtual appliances.
1. configurator-va (Horizon Workspace Configurator virtual appliance)
- The initial configurations tasks are performed by the configurator-va. All configurations are distributed to the other virtual appliances in the vApp.
2. service-va (Horizon Workspace Manager virtual appliance)
- Provides the Web Interface to administer user, groups and resources.
3. connector-va (Horizon Workspace Connector virtual appliance)
- This va is responsible for user authentication, directory synchronization, ThinApp catalog loading and View pool synchronization
4. data-va (Horizon Workspace Data virtual appliance)
- This virtual appliance manages the 100% on premise solution for controlling user based files. Similar like Dropbox.
5. gateway-va (Horizon Workspace Gateway virtual appliance)
- Is the single endpoint for all end user communication.
In vSphere Client go to File > Deploy OVF Template and respond to the wizard prompts. Select Power On After Deployment at the end of the wizard.
Open the console of the configurator-va and follow the installation instructions. The configurator-va is verifying your network configuration. If your DNS and reverse lookup configuration is incorrect the installation will fail and you have to fix your DNS issues first. If anything went well you’ll get the following screen.
The wizard continues and you need to enter the following informations:
- Global Root password for all virtual appliances
- SMTP Server Name and Port (If you do not have SMTP in you lab you can specify any external SMTP Server for testing purposes)
- External Gateway Name and Port
- vCenter IP Address, Port, Admin User and Password
Finished
After the wizard has completed you will get the Success page with the URL of the Horizon Workspace Root CA. I suggest to download the PEM file with your favorite browser.
Congratulation ! You’ve finished the Part 1 of the Installation.
VMware Horizon Suite 1.0 licensing overview
Good overview on VMware Horizon Suite 1.0 licensing in the VMware Knowledge Base. This article shows how the products are licensed and which components are included.
Protip: Logging into the Horizon Workspace web interface from your Mac without using credentials or SecurID
VMware has a announced the availability of the Horizon Suite for this quarter. Part of the Horizon Suite is Horizon Workspace, a unified workspace for your end users. Workspace consists of the former Horizon Application Manager, the Project Octopus now known as Horizon Data and the Blast technology which gives you HTML5 access to your virtual desktop from any device. I’m already working with Horizon Workspace and I really love it as it is so easy to share files with my colleagues, customers and partners. Horizon Workspace gives you a client for Mac, Windows, iOS and Android and also a Web Interface for managing your files and folders.
In my case when accessing the Web Interface my admin has configured a 2-factor authentication with RSA’s SecurID. In the first few days I thought I’ve to login to the website with the SecurID every time but this was quite annoying. There must be another way to get into your files with a better user experience and there is.
On my Mac I’ve my Horizon folder in the finder where I can manage my files just like with Dropbox. If I want to access the web interface I only have to click on the Workspace icon in the task bar and then choose “Open Horizon web page”. In that case the client uses SSO (Single Sign On) to access the web interface without having need for the SecurID passcode.
