Category Archives: View

Thinking about a VDI initiative? Watch this.

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Lewan Solutions Architect, Kenneth Fingerlos, wowed the crowd last month at the GPU Technology Conference (GTC) 2014 with his presentation on VDI, “Virtual is Better than Physical Delivering a Delightful User Experience from a Virtual Desktop“.

GTC is the world’s biggest and most important GPU developer conference. Taking place in Silicon Valley, GTC offers unmatched opportunities to learn how to harness the latest GPU technology, along with face-to-face interaction with industry luminaries and NVIDIA experts.

Leveraging his industry leading expertise, Kenneth “delivered in spades,” as described in a review of his presentation for The Register:

The VDI talk was the kind of GTC session I love. It’s where a real-world expert talks about how a difficult task is actually accomplished. Not the theory, not how it should work on paper, but what it takes to actually move a project from Point “A” to Point “We’re done with this”.
Ken Fingerlos from Lewan Technology delivered in spades with his “Virtual is Better than Physical: Delivering a Delightful User Experience from a Virtual Desktop” GTC14 session. Delightful? Hmm…In my past lives, I’ve had to use some virtual PCs and my experience ranged from “absolutely unusable” to “omg I hate this”.
It’s easy to see that Fingerlos has been around the block when it comes to VDI. He has all the right credentials, ranging from VMware to Citrix to Microsoft. But more importantly, he’s been there and done it.

Read the complete review from theregister.co.uk

Kenneth’s GTC Presenter’s Bio

View the complete session and slide deck:
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First few hours on the Motorola Xoom

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Just spend my first few hours on the Motorola Xoom that we have acquired for our Desktop Virtualization showroom!

http://danbrinkmann.wordpress.com/2011/04/11/my-first-few-hours-with-the-motorola-xoom/

The list of hardware and software continues to climb.  Any vendors want to get on the list?

  • Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop
  • VMware View
  • VMware vSphere
  • AppSense
  • Wyse Xenith
  • HP Thin Clients (various)
  • HP 8440p laptop (Citrix XenClient capable)
  • Streamed VHD delivery to HP All-in-one PC
  • Motorola Xoom
  • iPad 2
  • Dell Equallogic storage
  • HP P4000 (older Lefthand units running latest SANiQ)
  • NetApp
  • Dell m600 and m610 blades (thank you VERY much Dell for the additional memory!!!!

Soon to be added… Fusion-io card…wurd!

How-To Make XPe a View Appliance

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Background:
I had a need recently to modify the behavior of a Windows XPe (embedded) device to act as a VMware View Appliance. The goal was to end up with a device which would boot and launch the View Client connect to the View Manager and challenge the user for their ID/Password. Then connect to a specific virtual desktop.

Some devices have a wizard for configuring exactly this behavior, however the device I’m working with seems to have no such feature.

This is just a little diferent from the ‘kiosk mode’ feature of View in that the View Client does challenge the user for their credentials rather than having the login credentials stored/passed to it.

Note, a variation on this idea could be used to make a repurposed desktop act as an appliance for either View or XenDesktop.

This could also be made a little prettier by using a .vbs script and wscript rather than the .bat file and cmd.exe.

Solution:
1.) Disable File write filter
2.) Write batch/cmd file which launches View Client with appropriate parameters in a loop (points to VMware – View client accepts USB pass-through and desktop to launch from the command line).
3.) Modify for the auto-login user – hkcuSoftwareMicrosoftWindows NTCurrentVersionWinLogonShell to launch the batch/cmd file. You can do this using the ‘load hive’ feature of regedit running as the admin user.
4.) Logout as admin, let the auto-login login as user – test, test, test.
5.) Modify CMD launch properties to minimize the cmd window size.
6.) Kill the CMD process
7.) Logout of ‘user’ session (ctrl-alt-del)
8.) Enable File write filter

End result:
When the user logs in explorer.exe is never launched, and the view client presents it’s login challenge. When the view session terminates the .bat file re-launches the view client … forever.

Contents of Command file:
REM – ViewAppliance Shell Script
ECHO OFF
:START
C:Program FilesVMwareVMware ViewClientBinwswc.exe -serverURL ViewManager -desktopName Destkop -connectUSBOnInsert true -connectUSBOnStartup true
goto START