Following on from creating an RDS Farm within Horizon View Administrator and an Application Pool based on applications hosted an RDS session host, we are going to create an RDS desktop pool.

 

That's right, you can now have a desktop which is a shared/hosted desktop on an RDS session host (much like Citrix XenApp).

In some use cases a group of staff may not require a full virtual desktop to perform their job. In which case giving them access to a desktop hosted on a shared RDS host would be a more economical solution.

But the access to this shared desktop could be published via the same method access their virtual desktops and using the same PCoIP protocol, which is quite exciting for me and another design option available for those solutions where a group of users just use IE, email, file and print and have a low resource utilisation. 

 

One of the most prominent new features of VMware Horizon View 6, is the ability to utilise Windows Server RDS Hosts to provide server based applications and desktops to users.

This is quite possibly the most desirable feature of recent releases. As a consultant covering both VMware and Citrix solutions, this levels the playing field somewhat in terms of publishing applications (but not entirely) between the two vendors. If anything this will make it more interesting in the next couple of releases as VMware advance this functionality.

So what is all the fuss about? After all you could have created an RDS host with RemoteApp previously and given View users access to these.

The VMware EUC development team has developed a way in which PCoIP can be used as a protocol on RDS hosts, much like Citrix use the ICA protocol. This has required VMware to work very closely with Microsoft to achieve this.

The result is that it's now possible to present applications on an RDS host (or a Collection of RDS Hosts) via VMware Horizon View Administrator. Managing entitlements in the same place and offering these RDS based applications (and desktops) via the same Horizon View Client. All the while using these applications via the same PCoIP protocol as View virtual desktops which should improve the users experience compared to using the standard RDP (RemoteFX protocol).

 

DirectAccess is a feature of the Remote Access role in Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2, however it has actually been around since 2008 R2.

The client component of DirectAccess is actually built into Windows 8.x and does not require any additional roles or software installing.

 

DirectAccess is a remote access solution which can replace traditional VPN (either MS based or otherwise).

Instead of the client having to initiate a VPN connection to the office/datacentre after they logon, DirectAccess automatically connects computers and users to their corporate network if they are connected to the internet. 

 

VMadmin.co.uk is a personal blog with a primary focus on virtualisation within IT, but also covers other related infrastructure technologies. 

I've been running VMadmin.co.uk since 2008, when it initially it begun life as a wiki containing my personal configuration tips and notes, which I could access as I travelled. These were not publically available, however I soon decided to open them up to the world and the interest from the audience inspired me to continually add more posts.

At the time of writing this in 2014, (some 6 years on) there are currently 325 posts ranging from how to series guiding through the installation of vSphere, to best practice tips and advice on resolving issues I've personally come across out in the field.

 

Automated desktop pools contain desktops which are provisioned by vCenter server from a master image.
 
A virtual machine created in vCenter (with a snapshot) is used to create several unique copies of the same desktop.
 
When using View Composer, linked clones are created instead of full clones. Linked clones use a parent disk (aka replica), then View Composer creates what is known as a "diff disk" which contains the differences from the replica. All changes are written to the VMs individual diff disk.
 
 
Here we are going to create an Floating assignment Automated Desktop Pool using View Composer and the Windows 8.1 master image we created previously.

 

  1. Horizon View 6.0 - Part 4 - Creating a Windows 8.1 Golden/Master/Template Image
  2. Horizon View 6.0 - Part 3 - Configuring Horizon View Administrator, Events DB, vCenter and Active Directory
  3. Horizon View 6.0 - Part 2 - Installing Horizon View Composer
  4. Horizon View 6.0 - Part 1 - Installing Horizon View Connection Server
  5. Unable to Remove vCenter Server from View Administrator
  6. Update/Upgrade Juniper SSG5 (SSG/Netscreen) ScreenOS Firmware via Web UI
  7. VMware ThinApp 5 - Part 1 - Installing ThinApp 5
  8. Exclude/Remove Domain in VMware View Administrator, Client and HTML Access with VDMADMIN

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