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P U B L I S H I N G
Sa
pl
e
P r o f e s s i o n a l
E x p e r t i s e
D i s t i l l e d
ee
Barry Coombs
P U B L I S H I N G
Chapter 9, Managing User Profiles with View Persona Management, introduces you
to Horizon View Persona Management, what it is, and why you would want to deploy
it. We will then examine how it is driven by Standard Active Directory Group Policy
finishing with an in depth look at the policies available.
Chapter 10, Delivering Remote Applications with Horizon Advanced, dives deeper
into the key feature of Horizon Advanced Edition, and looks at how Horizon View
publishes an application directly into the Horizon View Client, without the need of
having to launch a full virtual desktop machine. We will walk through the installation
and configuration process to get our first set of Horizon View published applications
available to the end users.
Chapter 11, Delivering Session-based Desktops with Horizon View, covers the other
half of View's remoting capabilities and looks at how Horizon View can deliver sessionbased desktops from a Microsoft RDSH infrastructure.
Chapter 12, View Client Options, covers how the View Client is used to receive and
display the virtual desktops and applications on the end user's device. In this chapter,
we will look at the options for the View Client, both hardware and software, and
discuss the various options and why you would choose one method over another.
Chapter 13, Upgrading to Horizon View 6, covers all the things you need to consider
before upgrading and will then take you through the upgrade process. This chapter
is designed for those that are currently running a previous version of Horizon View
and are looking to upgrade to the latest version.
Chapter 14, Horizon 6 Advanced Edition, covers some of the additional features
that are part of the Horizon Advanced Edition, namely VMware Mirage and
VMware Workspace Portal.
Chapter 15, Introduction to App Volumes, will show you how to get up and running
to the point of delivering your first set of applications. App Volume is one of the
newest features of Horizon Enterprise Edition following the VMware acquisition
of Cloud Volumes. App Volumes provides real-time application delivery.
Chapter 16, Introduction to VSAN for VDI, covers an overview of the VMware Virtual
SAN (VSAN) technology, how it is architected, and how you create a VSAN-enabled
cluster ready to use for your VDI users.
Chapter 17, Troubleshooting, covers some troubleshooting techniques and methods
for use within Horizon View rather than going through a list of problems and issues.
Introduction to
VMware Horizon 6
VMware Horizon 6 is the foundation of VMware's End User Computing (EUC)
solution. It first came to the market 12 years ago, when server virtualization was
becoming a more mature and prevalent technology and VMware applied the same
principles that it used in server virtualization, and applied them to desktops,
by virtualizing and centralizing the management and deployment.
Before we get into discussing product specifics, let's define what we mean when we
talk about Virtual Desktop Infrastructure or VDI, and then take a brief stroll down
memory lane and look at where and how this started.
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VDI sometimes get confused with Server Based Computing (SBC) or Remote
Desktop Services (RDS). So what are the differences between these technologies
and VDI (if any)?
Let's take SBC/RDS first, as these are the technologies that have probably been
around the longest. In fact, you could probably trace these back as far as the 1950s,
with the introduction of mainframe technology that was designed to deliver
centralized computer power running the applications, with users connecting to the
applications using a green-screen-type terminal, which was more or a less just a
screen with a keyboard:
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Chapter 1
As shown in the previous diagram, SBC or RDS is seemingly not that different from
VDI. You are connecting to an application that is installed on a server and running in
a separate, protected session for each user who connects to it. The difference is that
it is hosted on x86-based servers running a multi-user operating system instead
of being a separate instance of the operating system. A user would connect to a
session via a terminal or thin client. In fact, SBC is sometimes referred to as
thin-client computing.
You could also be connecting to an operating system running in the same way, in
that the operating system, like the applications described earlier, is also running in
a separated, protected individual user session. This is the key difference between
VDI and SBC. In an RDS environment, users are leveraging shared resources and
single instances of applications, whereas, in a VDI environment, the resources
are dedicated, and each user has their own instance of the operating system
and applications.
Security and compliance: No data actually leaves the data center unless
the IT department has specifically configured a policy to allow it, such as
the ability to connect a USB pen drive. All that gets transmitted to the client
devices are the screenshots of the virtual desktop, with keyboard and mouse
interactions being sent back to the virtual desktop. It's a bit like having a
remote control for your desktop.
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Mobile and BYOD from anywhere: Virtual desktop clients enable mobile
devices, tablets, and noncorporate-owned devices to connect securely to
corporate desktops. Following the flexible working theme, users can now
choose a device that suits them to access their corporate desktop. Whether it
be a tablet, smart phone, or a non-Windows platform, users can still access
their corporate desktop securely from remote locations.
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Chapter 1
Later the same year, View 5.0 was released with more new features, aimed at
improving the end-user experience, the key one being the introduction of Persona
Management that allowed a user's profile to be independent from the virtual
desktop. When a user logs in via the same profile to any virtual desktop, their
profile is delivered on-demand. View 5.0 also introduced 3D graphic support
using the latest vSphere 5.0 platform, as well as some major enhancements to the
PCoIP protocol.
Although only a point release in May 2012, View 5.1 had a number of significant
enhancements, especially around storage, with the introduction of the View Storage
Accelerator, View Composer Array Integration, and the ability to scale the hosting
infrastructure up to a 32-node cluster when using NFS storage. This version also
added Radius two-factor authentication, improved USB device support, a standalone
View Composer, and the ability support profile migration from XP to Windows 7 as
well as from physical desktops to virtual desktops with Persona Management.
In March 2013, VMware View 5.2 was released, and to bring it in line with
VMware's launch of the brand launch of Horizon (launched at the same time), it was
renamed to Horizon View 5.2. In this release, there were a number of new features
based on end-user experience, such as support for unified communications with
Microsoft Lync 2013, hardware-accelerated graphics with Virtual Shared Graphics
Acceleration (vSGA), and Windows 8 support. One of the biggest updates came in
the form of a feature pack that allowed a user to access their desktop in an HTML 5
browser using the VMware Blast protocol.
A second release, later in 2013 with Horizon View 5.3, saw the introduction of
Virtual Dedicated Graphics Acceleration (vDGA) that allowed a virtual desktop
to have dedicated access to a GPU in the host. It is also the first release to support
Windows Server 2008 R2 as the virtual desktop machine, meaning you can "skin"
the operating system to look like a desktop. The main reason for this was that there
is no Service Provider License Agreement (SPLA) for Windows 7, so the license
agreement doesn't allow you to deploy Windows 7 as a virtual desktop until you
purchase a Microsoft Virtual Desktop Access (VDA) license. In this model, you do
not require a VDA license per user. The other advantage is that Windows Server
2008 Datacenter Edition allows you to have unlimited virtual machines. It's licensed
on a per-CPU model. It's worth noting that we are running the Windows Server
operating system as a replacement to the desktop operating system and not as a
desktop session.
Finally, Horizon Mirage support was added to manage full clone desktops.
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Chapter 1
The final 5.x release arrived in 2014, with Horizon View 5.3.1 adding support for
Virtual SAN (VSAN). The timeline is shown pictorially in the following diagram:
That brings us right up-to-date and to the latest version, VMware Horizon 6. In the
next section, we will look at VMware Horizon 6 in more detail.
VMware Horizon 6
VMware Horizon 6 is the next generation of VMware's EUC vision and strategy
to deliver desktop computing environments and publishing applications. In the
previous sections, we have discussed some of the differences between VDI and SBC
RDS, and the advantages of the two solutions. However, now Horizon 6 offers the
ability to deliver VDI desktops, published applications, and session-based desktops
from one platform.
Following on from the VMware acquisition of AirWatch, VMware now has two
distinct brands:
[7]
This book focuses on the brand Horizon, the solution for the delivery of desktops
and applications as centralized services.
VMware Horizon 6 was announced on April 9, 2014 with the latest 6.1 version being
released on March 12, 2015 and comes packaged in three different editions.
In the next section, we will cover the different product editions for Horizon 6.
Application delivery
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Chapter 1
Summary
In this chapter, we had a look at what VDI is and covered some of the history
of where it all began for VMware, demonstrating that VMware was, and still is,
at the forefront of virtual desktop and application delivery.
We then went on to discuss the latest release, VMware Horizon 6.0, and the three
different editions that are available, namely: Horizon View, Horizon Advanced,
and Horizon Enterprise.
In the next chapter, we will take a deep dive into the technology of View and start
looking at the architecture.
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