This installment of the XenDesktop installation series will show you how easy it is to install the XenDesktop 7 VDA (Virtual Delivery Agent). The VDA can be installed on client VMs, servers (for XenApp), or physical PCs if you want to remote high-powered 3D graphics. It contains the 'secret HDX...
This is the fourth installment of my CloudVolumes spin around the block. So far the installation as has been quick, encountered no product problems, and the experience seems polished even for a v1.0 product. Given my good experience thus far, I can't wait to see CloudVolumes AppStack in action. Can I really instantly...
Welcome to Part 3 of installing and configuring CloudVolumes. In Part 1 I provided a short introduction on what CloudVolumes is and started the management console installation process. In Part 2Â I configured basic settings such as Active Directory, vCenter, and datastores. Now we are ready to install the CloudVolumes agent...
In Part 1 of "Installing CloudVolumes" I covered the basic concept of what CloudVolumes does, and we provisioned a Windows Server 2008 R2 VM for their management console. We are now ready to configure the CloudVolumes Manager console to interface with AD, vCenter, and setup the vSphere datastores. So far the CloudVolumes installation...
Last weekend I was catching up on my RSS feeds with Feedly (great Google Reader replacement BTW), and stumbled on an article on Brian Madden's site about a new way to enable non-persistent VDI. In that article, and accompanying video, they demoed a stack of software that I found very interesting. They...
This series includes:VMware View 5.1 Installation Part 1 - View Connection ServerThis is the second installment in the VMware View 5.1 installation and configuration series. The first part covered the installation of View connection server and its SSL certificate. This post covers the optional component, View Composer 3.0. Composer is...
Of course after a weekend of creating my own spreadsheet to calculate my storage requirements for XenDesktop Andre Leibovici created a XenDesktop version of his View calculator. This is a great resource for sizing your storage, calculating IOPS, number of datastores, and other details. A sample of the fields is...
When sizing your storage subsystem for a VDI implementation, it's extremely critical to understand how your VMs will behave and the resulting IO load. Miscalculate and you will suffer poor performance and angry users. Oversize your array and you will waste money. However, measuring your VM performance may not be as...
When building vSphere VM templates best practices would recommend that a number of security lockdowns be incorporated into the template. There are a variety of sources for recommended lockdowns, such as the VMware vSphere 4.1 Hardening Guide. But what if you already have VMs in production that you need to lock down, or...
Among the licensing kerfuffle surrounding vSphere 5.0, VDI users may have overlooked some interesting information that VMware posted about VDI and vSphere 5.0 today. Myself and other bloggers like Brian Madden have done some analysis on what vSphere 5.0 means for VDI, mostly for non-VMware products such as XenDesktop. However,...