Virtualization Team

One of the most asked questions lately by partners and customers when it come to VMware View 4.6 Implementation (I believe its applicable for older versions of View as well) is that when creating a Windows 7 Desktop Pools that utilize Linked Clones & try to utilize Quick Prep the deployment of desktop fails at the customizing stage. In the other hand, if they use SysPrep instead of Quick Prep the Desktop Deployment succeed & Desktops work normally though its much slower than Quick Prep can customize a Desktop VM. Further, Windows XP Pools work just fine with Quick Prep at the same setup. To be honest this has hit me before and that how I found out the solution.

For all of those Android Tablets fans who had a VMware View environment and wanted to connect to, but had no official VMware View Client that support Android this post is carrying out the good news to you. Now VMware has officially released a VMware View Client for Android Tablets, which finally will give us the same functionality iPAD users has enjoyed for a while. I believe now I can move on and buy an Android Tablets my self and be sure it will work with VMware View with the full functionality without any problem. Getting the VMware View Client up and running on your Android tablet is nothing more than a quick visit to your Android Market and download the client from there. You hear it correctly, VMware has just pushed the VMware View Client into the Android Market for ease of availability.

If you are an Ubuntu user like I am, a VMware View PCoIP Client for Ubuntu has been long waited for. Unfortunately, officially it still not released by VMware so if you want the official release then you just have to wait. Though if you are looking for a work around then its here, and you don’t need to get stuck with the disastrous RDP protocol. Before I mention anything further, how about watching the below video as a teaser. A real teaser!



I believe one of the greatest addition to VMware View 4.5 is Location Based Printing. I have the question just popping up right and left lately (3 customers just this week), on how to get VMware View users to print to their nearest printers when they are using virtual desktops. In physical environment this was possible by applying computer policies, but when using terminal services or VDI the device used to access terminal service or Virtual Desktop might not be on the domain if even exist when using Zero Clients. Further, the user might access the same VM(Same computer name) from different locations, which make the use of Computer Policy alone not applicable.

I have just been assigned to assist one of our partners design a VDI environment using VMware View 4.5 with 5000+ Virtual Desktop. At this number of desktops every small bit has to be counted for while putting the design out. Some of the info required for the design was not ready in my mind nor obviously documented on the web. For that I had to contact our PSO team, & they have shared the answers with me. I am really thankful to the bright consultant who helped me with these info (requested not to mention his name so I will respect that). As these tips were not easy to find I thought I will share it with all of you.

While trying to add the domain administrator to my VMware View Composer settings in VMware View Manager, I was getting the following errors repeatedly:

Wrong Domain

Bad user name or Password

I have found out that the problem was caused by my Virtual Center where VMware View Composer reside was not a part of the domain, and was not using my domain controller as a DNS resolver. To resolve this problem I had came up with two solution:

1- Use your domain controller DNS as the DNS resolver on your VMware vCenter / VMware View Composer Server if possible.

2- On the View Composer server, add the domain name to the domain controller’s IP address mapping in the Windows hosts file: %WINDIR%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts.