VM-Aware

I found an excellent article written on DABCC.com discussing ways to make Windows XP essentially a thin client. Some of the tweaks include:

• Desktop Folder Redirection
• Start Menu Redirection
• Autologin
• Loading iexplore As Shell

Very useful for all those people running VMware VDI as you can use these tips to load VDM in kiosk mode.

3Par have announced some back-end storage enhancements that can greatly improve the usability, scalability and performance of VMware VDI. Thin Copy Desktop has some of the following enhancements:

Automated Disktop Image Creation & Management - Storage level snapshots that are VMware VDI aware. This will apparently make desktops available in seconds instead of minutes/tens of minutes

Fast & Granular Recovery of Desktop Images - Recovery of desktop images in seconds via the use of scheduled snapshots

Greater Performance - Using Virtual Copy snapshots, which can share the same cache pages for common data within a snapshot tree. In the case of booting, most of the data is common among the virtual desktop boot images, requiring only a single copy in cache to potentially support hundreds of booting clients

You can read all about it here.

Firstly, let me start by saying that not everyone is going to want to ‘tweak’ with the bowels of RDP, but if you are so inclined then check out this article.

I stumbled upon it when wondering how I could get people to stop simply disconnecting sessions and logging off properly. (more…)

VMware’s 2.1 release of VDM brought with it the option to ‘Allow blocking of incoming RDP connections that are not from VDM Clients’.

This is great, but what if you want to administer the Virtual Machines using RDP?  There isn’t a way of changing this behaviour in the web interface, so what do you do?

It transpires that there is a registry tweak that a customer of mine (thanks Tony) forwarded to me that can change this feature.

This registry tweak needs to be completed on all the Virtual Machines with the VDM agent installed.

Firstly create a new key called Configuration if it doesn’t already exist here:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\VMware, Inc.\VMware VDM\Agent\Configuration

Then add a new String value under the Configuration key called AllowDirectRDP and give it a value of true.

You may need to reboot the Virtual Machine if the change is not immediate.

You can download a reg file here to speed up the process.

A quick post to a link to a brilliant document about VMware’s recent VDI 2.1 release.  At 164 pages it is very conprehensive and talks through installation, configuration and other little tidbits.

Enjoy!

There is a great article on the Virtual Desktop Blog over at VMware Communities that goes into great detail about how you can better harness any idle VDI power.

Clicking here will open the article at source.