Horizon View 6.0 - Part 3 - Configuring Horizon View Administrator, Events DB, vCenter and Active Directory

So far in this Horizon View 6.0 how to series, we have installed a single View Connection Server and installed View Composer on the vCenter server.

We are now going to proceed configuring the service accounts for View to connect to vCenter and join desktops to the domain followed by the events database. Additionally we need to create an OU and delegate permissions on this OU.

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Horizon View 6.0 - Part 2 - Installing Horizon View Composer

VMware View Composer is a component of VMware Horizon View (all editions).

Horizon View Composer offers features such as storage reduction, improved OS management and rapid desktop deployment.

VMware Horizon View Composer uses linked clones to provide a 50% to 90% reduction in storage requirements for virtual desktops. If View Composer is not used, 100's or 1,000's of desktops 25GB+ in size would exhaust expensive SAN storage.

Horizon View Composer does this by using creating linked clones from a parent disk, instead of full clones. This creates what is known as a "diff disk" of the differences between the parent disk and itself once the virtual desktop is powered on. Without the parent disk the linked clones will not work. 

The different could be instead of each desktop requiring 25GB+ of space each, the linked clone may only be around 5GB in size. This varies depending on the amount of changes in the desktop during the day, memory/pagefile size and also if the virtual desktop is refresh or deleted after each logoff.

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Horizon View 6.0 - Part 1 - Installing Horizon View Connection Server

Firstly, what is VMware Horizon? It's a collection of products which covers both virtual desktops, physical desktops, RDS hosts and virtual applications.

There are 3 editions of VMware Horizon;

Standard, Advanced and Enterprise (Feature comparison: http://www.vmware.com/products/horizon-view/compare.html)

Horizon View Standard simply provides virtual desktops via View like it always used to. However it also includes View Composer, licensing for vSphere/vCenter Desktop and ThinApp (like was the case with the old View Premier edition).

The Advanced and Enterprise editions add features such as RDS hosted applications, VSAN and vCOps monitoring amongst other features such as physical desktop image management (aka Mirage).

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Unable to Remove vCenter Server from View Administrator

When trying to remove a vCenter Server from VMware Horizon View Administrator, all pools and desktops managed via that vCenter server must be deleted first.

If they are not, you will get the following warning message and the vCenter server will not be removed:

"The pools and transfer servers associated with this vCenter must be deleted before this vCenter can be removed"

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