How to remain in control of your Horizon environment

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Ljmaegmnepbgjekghdfkgegbckolmcok-featuredIn this blog post I want to share a simple piece of advice that will help you in maintaining your VMware Horizon environment. Image management is an important part of managing your VMware Horizon environment. If you are using Instant Clones (this is the future proof way of delivering VMware Horizon VDI’s in your environment), during the image publishing phase (this is referred to as the Priming phase) VMware Horizon starts creating the following VM’s CP-Template, CP-Replica (both are turned off and there is one per datastore per Desktop pool) and a CP-Parent (this machine is turned on and there is one per ESX host per datastore per Desktop Pool).

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Update a VMware App Volumes AppStack

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In this blog article I will describe the process of updating a VMware App Volumes AppStack.

VMware acquired CloudVolumes in August 2014 and released it with the name App Volumes in December 2014. App Volumes is free to owners of the Horizon View Enterprise bundle and can also be purchased as a standalone product.

VMware App Volumes has proven to be a very powerful product to deliver applications to both VMware Horizon as well as Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktops.

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Persistent VDI VMware Horizon

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When it comes to virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), administrators have a lot of choices. You may have wondered about the differences between VDI software vendors, (Citrix or VMware), remote display protocols (Blast, PCOIP, HDX) or all the different license forms out there.
Now for this blog lets tackle the first two questions, we will be using VMware Horizon and Blast for as remote display protocol.

VDI can be either persistent or non persistent. It al depends on the requirements of the workforce. Most office workers will be fine with a none persistent desktop. It delivers a constant user experience. It takes away many of the maintenance tasks physical devices require.

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Manage VMware AppVolumes via Ivanti Automation

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OIP_thumbIn this blog article I will describe how you can automate assigning VMware AppVolumes to AD user groups by using PowerShell via Ivanti Automation. To accomplish this task I am using the API of App Volumes.

The Powershell function I am using I found online, and is created by by my former colleague Thomas Brown. I slightly altered the script to meet my needs to accomplish the task at hand.

VMware AppVolumes has proven to be a very powerful product to deliver application to both VMware Horizon as well as Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktops.

The relative parts of my setup are:

  • VMware AppVolumes 2.18.014U
  • Ivanti Automation 2020.1

If you like to know more about creating an AppStacks please read: More on AppStacks

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Updating your VMware Horizon Desktop Pool

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This blog post will describe the steps to update your VMware Horizon Desktop pool with the latest snapshot of your master VM.

For this example we have updated our master VM with the latest Windows security updates, and we have updated the Ivanti Workspace Control agent to the latest version. There are a number of sources where you can find the best practices on how to create and seal the master image. An imported part of creating a master image is optimizing. A good way to go about this is using the VMware OS Optimizing Tool. The initiative, VDI Like a Pro, from LoginVSI provides a very good template to be used within the VMware OSOT for Windows 10.

Before we will start the update process we first need to consider how we will go about the update. Will we update the Desktop Pool immediately or will we schedule it outside of business hours. If we do run the update immediately we have to consider how we will affect the current sessions, do we want to force log off the current session or wait to update these VDI’s when the current sessions logoff.

To start the process for updating the VMware Horizon Desktop Pool we first need to open the properties of the Desktop Pool we want to upgrade.

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Create AppStack part One

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Image result for app volume logoAs the title implies this blog article will be the first on a series of blogs on VMware App Volumes
(formerly CloudVolumes). VMware acquired
CloudVolumes in August 2014 and released it with the name App Volumes in December 2014.
VMware App Volumes is a real-time application delivery system that we can use to dynamically deliver and manage applications. App Volumes builds a virtual machine disk file for applications and
connects them to a user desktop or virtual machine. Administrators can use App Volumes to remove, to update, or to install applications for users in real time. App Volumes allows applications and data to follow end users across devices and sessions.

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Connecting VMware Horizon 7.11 administrator to VMware vCenter

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Horizon_LogoVMware Horizon, formerly called Horizon View, is a desktop and app virtualization product developed by VMware. It was first released under the name VMware VDM, but with the release of version 3.0.0 in 2008 it was changed to VMware. The name was       updated to Horizon View with the launch of version 6 in April 2014 and is now called VMware Horizon. The current version is 7.11.

Today I am connecting my VMware Horizon 7.11 environment to my VMware vCenter Appliance.

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VMware ESXi : Thick disk to Thin disk

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imageAt the end of last year I have reinstalled my home lab environment from Microsoft Hyper-V to VMware ESXi. I converted my VM’s to the ESXi format with the VMware Offline converter. This process was going smoothly. To be honest way smoother that expected. I worked a lot with VMware in the past but since I started working at PQR I worked with VMware more and more. I really like the management features in VMware vCenter.
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