Sc@-tt3r-ed Thoughts

I’m in the process of trying to get rid of any thick clients that I currently work on to convert solely to Virtual Machines, and clear out my desk space.
Well, I thought the best way to do this was to move my Precision 690 to the lab, install ESXi on it, and have a my VM on there.

As I tried to add the VM that resides on this ESXi server (which is not part of vCenter), I could not add it as an individual desktop.  I then remembered that I needed to have the View agent installed for this to work. After installing the View Agent, I was hopeful, but alas, the VM still didn’t show up. On Step 3 of adding the machine, it would supposedly give a list of available VMs to add and a find option, but nothing could be found. ..Continue reading..

I’m in the process of implementing VMWare vSphere 4.0 at work, with an add-on for VMWare View.

I had been working with ESXi for a while, so the switch to ESX 4 wasn’t too hard. On the View side, the learning curve was quite easy as well. There’s little that needs to be done in VDI Manager, and the rest is managed just like it would be managed on a physical machine deployed.

For those techies reading this that haven’t dealt with sysprep yet, it’s a Microsoft utility, which you can install, and it ends up residing in C:\Windows\System32\deploy.cab , unzipping this cab will reveal a set of files required to sysprep a machine. ..Continue reading..

Well, since I’ve just spent the past 6 hours trying to figure out how the heck to get USB Redirection to work on HP T5545 , I thought I would write up some instructions on how to set it up, and all the gotchas to avoid.

For the record, I only set this device up because I got stuck with 50 of them for one of my schools, and for anyone who doesn’t want headaches, I would recommend they go with XPe (no, not WinCE), I’m pretty sure, the additional premium you will pay for the device itself will be saved in time trying to configure/troubleshoot, and update it. This recommendation is based on my usage with VMWare View (formerly VDI), and where USB Redirection is absolutely needed. For any other purposes (ie: terminal services, ICA, RDP, etc..) , I cannot vouch for it, but I would suspect it would work just fine if you’re on a lower budget. ..Continue reading..

So, here I am sitting at my office trying to get VMWare View to work on an HP T5540 thin client. Had no idea where to get the client for. the 11Mb file that you get from VMWare is entirely too big to be intalled on that client. This is a Win CE operating system, which is so horrible to deal with anyway.

Google searches failed me left and right, everywhere I looked. People said that the T5540 can only be used in a remote desktop environment, which, of course, will lose out on the capability of VDI, dynamic provisioning, multiple desktop availability, Multimedia, and USB. Essentially, all the advantages of VDI would’ve gone down the drain. so that was not an option for me.

Some mentioned JRE version for Win CE, on which the VDI client will run. I had 2 problems with this one:

1. I couldn’t easily find a free JRE client for WinCE
2. For the life of me, I could not figure out how to get VDI Manager to use JRE.

So, I went ahead with my research, until I stumbled upon something called the VDI Broker Add-On for Microsoft Windows CE.  That can be found here: http://bit.ly/16M38p

If you look closely at the description of this download, however, you will find that it says this:

"This is an Altiris package that contains the VDM Broker Agent for the supported thin client models running a supported operating system.”

Hmm.. I thought I’d try it anyway. Downloading the file wasn’t a problem. Running the file, however, was. It just plain wouldn’t run from the T5540.

So poking around some more, I finally got the solution. Unzip the EXE that is supposedly designed for Altiris, and you will find a little file (145Kb)  called VDMClient.cab, which will do the trick. Now, copy this to your T5540, and run it, and you shall have your VDI client available.

This took me about an hour of research to figure out, since there is absolutely no documentation I could find about it anywhere!. 

Hopefully this will help someone that may be having the same problem.