When Google came up with Chrome OS I guess some of the  product manager hearts in the big operating system companies stopped bumping for a bit. Google with their own operating system, build on Linux, driven by the open source community and including every applications you need for a business desktop like office apps, collaboration all based on the web. But is web apps really just what you need? What about legacy native applications running on Windows, Mac or Linux? The Register has an exclusive story based on a public email from a Google engineer and some follow up correspondence which talks about a remote feature called Chromoting. What’s behind that? How will Google technically implement that feature? Maybe RDP, VNC, X11, ICA, HDX, NX……..PCoIP? How would a connection to the legacy system look like? Are they going to use a broker to manage the connection? Loads of questions and a huge room for rumour.

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Since the iPad is available I’ve seen several blog articles about using it to connect to a VMware View server but I wanted to try it myself. I don’t really know what I should say about it because it’s really easy to use. First of all you need the Wyse Pocket Cloud Client that is on offer for $14.99 at the moment. At the first start-up of the client you can switch to VMware View mode which gives you the configuration dialog for your connection. Configure your server URL, the username, password and domain and you’ll get access to the hosted desktop list. Select your preferred desktop and save the configuration. Then just select your saved session and hit connect. That’s it! The client does only support Microsoft’s RDP but even on my overseas connection it worked well.

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The users in a View environment access the virtual desktop via the RDP protocol. For that to work the user needs to have special access rights. As a standard only the administrator has direct RDP access to the remote system. To configure access for the user you could do that on a per desktop basis manually what would be time consuming or you can use the Group Policy Objects within the Active Directory which is the recommended way. First of all you’ll need to figure out who should get remote access and create one or more user groups in the Active Directory. In this example the groups is called vditestusers and it’s a member of the domain TEST. Diese This group will be a member of the local group Remote Desktop Users on the virtual desktop which has the needed remote access rights. For that reason you’ll need to configure the group in the GPO’s as a Restricted Group.

After that add configure the group as a member of the local group Remote Desktop users and the users will have remote access.

In the last step you need to allow the users to connect remotly using the Terminal Services. There is an option within the administrative templates to do that. Just go to: Computer Configuration, Administrative Templates, Windows Components and then Terminal Services. This option will enable the Remote Access on the desktop operating system.

More information:

VMware XP Deployment Guide (Seite 4): http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/XP_guide_vdi.pdf

Restricted Groups: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc785631.aspx

Centrally enable Remote Desktop using Group Policy: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc776790.aspx