Tag Archives: Horizon

Horizon on VMC header

Horizon on VMC – Considerations and setting up a lab environment

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A few months back, I setup a Horizon Environment running in our VMC environment used for lab purposes. Since then, I’ve been asked by several people to go through the setup. So, I’ve also decided to create a blog post on the matter.

This blog post will cover the considerations for running VMware Horizon on VMC, and the technical setup itself of the lab environment I created.

Update 4th May: I recorded a session for the London VMUG on this subject, which you can watch here.

Topics covered;

  • Horizon 7 on VMware Cloud on AWS is not DaaS
  • Horizon 7 on VMware Cloud on AWS Deployment Guide and Supportability
  • Feature Support
  • Horizon on VMC architecture
  • Platform Considerations
    • Identity Management
    • File Shares
    • Image management
  • Network Service
    • VMC Network Segments
    • Load Balancing
    • DHCP
  • Firewall Rules
    • Logging
  • Horizon Connection Broker Configuration
  • Some finl considerations
  • Further Resources
Horizon 7 on VMware Cloud on AWS is not DaaS

I will not cover the details of VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) in this post, but you can read about it here.

Horizon 7 (or later), running on top of VMC, is not a Desktop-as-a-Service offering. For this, we have our Horizon Cloud offering, which currently supports Azure and IBM Cloud.

Horizon on VMC, acts the same as the on-prem offering, i.e. the same considerations and configurations as you would take, if you deployed Horizon in your own private datacentre.

You can stretch existing Horizon environments to also make use of the compute and storage in VMC, and setup Cloud Pod Architecture between the locations as well. Alternatively, you can run a full Horizon environment solely within VMC itself. By running within VMC, you also ensure your desktops are near in proximity to native AWS services, such as file services, global load balancing services to name some examples.

Horizon 7 on VMware Cloud on AWS is not DaaS Continue reading Horizon on VMC – Considerations and setting up a lab environment →

VMwareHorizonView

VMware Horizon Blast – Failed to Connect to Connection Server

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After deploying my latest horizon lab, I hit an issue where I could not hit the login page to authenticate for a Horizon desktop using BLAST, I would be greeted by the following message:

Failed to Connect to Connection Server

failed to connect to connection server

I pulled my hair out for a few minutes, before I realised I’ve hit this issue before, and the fix is quite simple.

If the locked.properties file doesn’t exist in the directory C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware View\Server\sslgateway\conf then you must create it!

locked.properties checkOrigin false

Regards

Dean

Dean Lewis
cleanup

VDI Cleanup script I use before sealing any golden image before deployment

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Below is the VDI Cleanup script that I’ve been using over the years. I thought I’d post this after setting up a Horizon Lab environment. I shared it earlier in the year on Reddit, and had some good suggestions which I used to update the script. The script has been taken from other blogs over the years and just edited further and further for my own/customers needs.

Optimizations to any master are done using the VMware OS Optimization Tool.

I personally just run this as bat file to clean up and shut down the master template as a final step each time I make an update.

You can find the script on Github here, or below.

REM ************************************************
REM Stopping and disabling Windows Telemetry service
REM ************************************************
sc stop DiagTrack
sc config DiagTrack start= disabled
sc stop dmwappushservice
sc config dmwappushservice start= disabled
REM *********************
REM Stop and disable Windows update service
REM *********************
sc stop wuauserv
sc config wuauserv start= disabled
REM *********************
REM Delete any existing shadow copies
REM *********************
vssadmin delete shadows /All /Quiet
REM *********************
REM delete files in c:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Download\
REM *********************
del c:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Download\*.* /f /s /q
REM *********************
REM delete hidden install files
REM *********************
del %windir%\$NT* /f /s /q /a:h
REM *********************
REM delete prefetch files
REM *********************
del c:\Windows\Prefetch\*.* /f /s /q
REM *********************
REM Update OEM Information with Build Date
reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\OEMInformation /v Model /d "Build %DATE%" /t REG_EXPAND_SZ /f
REM *********************
REM Run Disk Cleanup to remove temp files, empty recycle bin
REM and remove other unneeded files
REM Note: Makes sure to run c:\windows\system32\cleanmgr /sageset:1 command 
REM       on your initially created parent image and check all the boxes 
REM       of items you want to delete 
REM *********************
c:\windows\system32\cleanmgr /sagerun:1
REM ********************
REM Defragment the VM disk
REM ********************
sc config defragsvc start= auto
net start defragsvc
defrag c: /U /V
net stop defragsvc
sc config defragsvc start = disabled
REM *********************
REM Clear all event logs
REM *********************
wevtutil el 1>cleaneventlog.txt
for /f %%x in (cleaneventlog.txt) do wevtutil cl %%x
del cleaneventlog.txt
REM *********************
REM release IP address
REM *********************
ipconfig /release
REM *********************
REM Flush DNS
REM *********************
ipconfig /flushdns
REM *********************
REM Shutdown VM
REM *********************
shutdown /s /t 0

Regards

Dean

Dean Lewis