Link: Brian Madden

There are predefined roles but you can also create new roles with customized privileges. You can directly use the following roles:

• Administrators
• Administrators (Read Only)
• Agent Registration Administrators
• Global Configuration and Policy Administrators
• Global Configuration and Policy Administrators (Read Only)
• Inventory Administrators
• Inventory Administrators (Read Only)

The built-in roles have already privileges predefined and they can’t be changed. If you want to do so you have to create a new role and add the desired privileges.

The screenshot gives you just an impression of the possible privileges in View Administrator.

Defining folders allows you also to setup a multitenant environment with the role based administrator features. In the root folder you can create different subfolders for your department. For example if you have users in America and Europe you could add two folders (see screenshot) for them. Then add the desktops to the respective folders. The IT departments or user helpdesks in the specific regions could now get only access to their desktops using permissions for the folders.

This also useful for companies offering virtual desktops on demand or hosting them for several customers. You can now run one View environment for numerous customers.

To reduce the management overhead to a minimum you should create dedicated Active Directory groups and organization units for the kiosk mode client. The group, which will be entitled to the desktop pool later must have a Pre-Windows 2000 group name in the Active Directory. It is recommended to use floating desktop pools for kiosk mode because they can be recreated after each usage. After creating the desktop pool, entitle the group to the pool via View Administrator. For each desktop pool you should create a separate user group. As mentioned before, the kiosk mode clients will use the MAC address of the client device for authentication.

To figure out the MAC of your client you can use the View Client software. For Windows clients use:

C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware View\Client\bin\wswc –printEnvironmentInfo

and for Linux clients use:

vmware-view –printEnvironmentInfo -s <connection_server>

to retrieve the clients MAC address. There are two steps left until you can connect to the virtual desktops for the first time. First you need to add the new “MAC address” account to your broker and Active Directory. The vdmadmin.exe tool can help you with that.

vdmadmin -Q -clientauth -add -domain DOMAENE -clientid 00:20:ee:aa:55:12 -group kiosk-group

Using this command forces the View Manager to create a new account based on the given MAC address. It also adds the new account to the group which is named kiosk-group in this example. The password for the new account is generated and set automatically. You could manually set a passwort using the parameter –password. Per default the View Connection servers doesn’t accept kiosk mode connection. You’ve to enable the kiosk mode connection on each VMware View Connection server manually. Please use the following command for that.

vdmadmin -Q -enable -s <connection_server> [-requirepassword]

That’s it! Now you can connect to the broker in kiosk mode. To do that please open a command prompt and change to the View Client installation directory. In the subfolder bin use this command:

C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware View\Client\bin\wswc -unattended [-serverURL <servername>]

The client connects automatically to the virtual desktop using the local MAC address for authentications. You can create a batch file which calls the command. Put this batch file in the autostart folder on a Windows Thin Client or start it during the boot on a Linux Client.

There are two new parameters for the VMware View Client which help you to automatically redirect USB devices which are locally connected to the connecting device. You can decide between automatically redirecting all devices on startup and/or redirecting usb devices on insert. Just add the parameters

–connectUSBOnStartup and –connectUSBOnInsert to your command line when calling the View Client.

C:\>osql -E -S vcenter.xxx.cd-k.de\SQLEXP_VIM
1> create database ViewEvents
2> go
1> exit

Then logon to the View Administrator and expand the View configuration option in the menu bar and select Event configuration. This page will allow you to configure a event database with the View Manager. It’s essential that you’ve created the database before, because there is now option to do it here.

In case of the SQL Server Express Database be sure to have SA authentication enabled for the server because only that is supported for the connection. As SQL Express is using dynamic Ports (not the standard port 1433) use the SQL Server Configuration Manager to find this TCP port. You’ll need it for the configuration as seen in the screenshot below.

When configured properly you’ll see the events when clicking on Monitoring, Events in the left menu pane. These information could also be obtained by using reporting tools which are accessing the database directly.

The event database gives you all information about the virtual desktop environment on one page. With the new role based administration modell you can give the monitoring team or helpdesk just access to teh events page if you want. For the database Microsoft SQL and Oracle is supported in this version.

Here’s the overview:

• Windows 7 Support 32/64-Bit
• Smart Card Support for PCoIP
• Local Mode Desktop
• A native Mac Client
• Kiosk Mode
• Automated USB Redirection
• Location based printing
• Client localization (German, Japanese, French, Simple Chinese)
• Adobe Flex UI Administrator interface
• Higher broker scalability
• Role based delegation
• SysPrep support for Linked Clone desktop pools
• Persistent disk management
• Tiered storage support
• Refresh, Recompose and storage rebalance for non-persistent pools
• Semi-automatic pools
• Extensibility with Powershell, SCOM and SDK’s, Event database
• System Dashboard, User diagnostics and troubleshooting
• ThinApp entitlement
• Smart Card revocation
• Support for vSphere and vCenter version 4.1

The most noticable change with View 4.5 is the new View Administrator interface which is based on Adobe Flex UI. A rich internet application, executable on Windows, Linux, Mac and every other device supporting Adobe Flash. The new View Administrator is incredibly fast, compared to the old version which was based on HTML. It’s required that you’ve installed Adobe Flash 10.0 or higher on your client to work with the new administration console.

After logging into the View Administrator you’ll be surprised about the speed of the new console. In the top-left area you’ll see two arrows which help you to navigate forward and backward in the console. The are below that gives you an quick overview of the system status. It includes information about the current online and offline sessions, issues with desktops, events and the system health. With the new menu on the left hand side you can directly access all broker functions and the configuration options. I’ll go in detail about that in further articles.

The middle-right area of the screen shows the content for each functionality. A really cool enhancement is the Dashboard. It gives you information about the system status, warnings and potential errors. Every related component is shown in the Dashboard and can be selected for more detailed information. The ESX hosts option for example gives you details about the software version running on the host, the cluster, vCenter and also how many desktops are running on the ESX box. But there is more useful information about the vCenter, Connection servers, storage and also the desktops which are running or currently in preparation.

Following to this article I’ll write more in detail about all features mentioned above starting today with a post about the new event database integration.

Also check the original VMware posting at: http://blogs.vmware.com/view/2010/08/modernizing-the-desktop-architecture-with-vmware-view-45.html and Scott Davis article at the View Point blog: http://blogs.vmware.com/view-point/2010/08/view-45-modernizing-the-windows-desktop.html

Loads of companies are going to migrate their desktop environments to Windows 7 but they have still browser based applications which are only supported with Internet Explorer 7. In this case there are a few options to go.

• Stay at Windows XP until the browser based application is supported on Internet Explorer 7 or 8.
• Migrate to Windows 7 and use the XP Mode to run a legacy Internet Explorer
• Use a Windows Terminal Server in version 2003 to deploy IE6 to your desktops

All of these options have their issues and there is a much easier way to go. VMware ThinApp 4.6 does fully support the virtualization of Internet Explorer 6 running on Windows 7. If you tried to virtualize the browser with an old version of ThinApp it might be possible that you see black boxes instead of the proper icons in the navigation bar but all these challenges are fixed now. Check the following video to see how it works.

With old versions of ThinApp it was a complex process to create an IE package. It required a clean instance of Windows 2000 with the native IE5 browser to perform an update to IE6 and record that. With ThinApp 4.6 you can easily grab the Internet Explorer 6 from a Windows XP installation.

With the new ThinDirect feature you can redirect URL’s from a native to an virtualized browser. Back to the browser applications which are only compatible with IE6, you can know force the Windows 7 system to open predefined URL’s in the virtualized IE6 instance. For example you’ve an web application which is only working in IE6, you can configure it’s URL http://yourapplication. A browser helper object is integrated in the local instance of Internet Explorer 7 and will open the link in the virtualized application if needed.

Another new features helps you to start ThinApp applications which inherits services as boot-time applications. This can help you to run an Apache web server for example, during the start up of your system.

My favourite is the new ThinApp Converter 1.0 which leverages a proper VM to automatically virtualize applications. The following operations can be automated:

• Distributing packaging work-load across multiple virtual machines
• Connecting to a named VM Workstations, vSphere, or ESX
• Taking snapshot of VM initial clean state
• Logging into Guest VM
• Mounting package source UNC share inside of VM.
• Mounting library output UNC share inside VM
• Running ThinApp pre-install snapshot process
• Running application installer in guest
• Waiting for application installer to complete
• Running ThinApp post-install snapshot process
• Generating application project from two ThinApp snapshots
• Building generated project into a package
• Saving both project and package in output library
• Reverting Virtual Machine to initial state

The last two features are:

• The public availability of the ThinApp Management SDK
• AppLink does know support wildcards for folders and files.

You can learn more about all features in the VMware ThinApp Blog and the Release Notes! Check it out!

Can I backup the data in those 3 user data folders by simply copying them to another location?

While that is possible, it is not recommended. If you choose to do file based backup, you must first shutdown the Zimbra Desktop data engine before running any types of backup. However we recommend users do backup using the import/export features provided by Zimbra Desktop instead. You will find this feature under your Preferences tab in the Zimbra Desktop UI.

(Link to the Zimbra FAQ)

It would be possible to just backup my /home/user/Zimbra/zdesktop folder (as seen in the screenshot below) but the best way should be to use the Export function within the Zimbra Desktop client.

To export data from your Zimbra accounts please go to the preferences dialog in the tab bar. After clicking on the Preferences tab please select Import/Export.

The export dialog gives you the chance to export the whole account data including calendar and contacts of calendar and contacts separately. For a full backup I’ve chosen Account as option here. With the checkbox “Advanced settings” you can even filter the data to be exported when choosing Account. Just click on the button Export afterwards and the download as Tar-Gzipped file starts immediately. Now you can copy the file to a file server, to an Online storage or another safe location.

Be careful if you’re using more that one account in the Zimbra Desktop client! The export function does always export the data from the selected mail account. In my case I’ve a private and my company account configured and needed to export twice. But it’s easy, just select the account in the left menu bar. (Screenshot below).

I’m really looking forward to work with Zimbra CS and Desktop as my company applications in the next weeks. I definitely think that it will give me the same options then Outlook/Exchange did.

Source: Blog du DS45