VMware View Composer is a component of VMware Horizon View (all editions).

Horizon View Composer offers features such as storage reduction, improved OS management and rapid desktop deployment.

 

VMware Horizon View Composer uses linked clones to provide a 50% to 90% reduction in storage requirements for virtual desktops. If View Composer is not used, 100's or 1,000's of desktops 25GB+ in size would exhaust expensive SAN storage.

Horizon View Composer does this by using creating linked clones from a parent disk, instead of full clones. This creates what is known as a "diff disk" of the differences between the parent disk and itself once the virtual desktop is powered on. Without the parent disk the linked clones will not work. 

The different could be instead of each desktop requiring 25GB+ of space each, the linked clone may only be around 5GB in size. This varies depending on the amount of changes in the desktop during the day, memory/pagefile size and also if the virtual desktop is refresh or deleted after each logoff.

 

 

Firstly, what is VMware Horizon? It's a collection of products which covers both virtual desktops, physical desktops, RDS hosts and virtual applications.

There are 3 editions of VMware Horizon;

Standard, Advanced and Enterprise (Feature comparison: http://www.vmware.com/products/horizon-view/compare.html)

 

Horizon View Standard simply provides virtual desktops via View like it always used to. However it also includes View Composer, licensing for vSphere/vCenter Desktop and ThinApp (like was the case with the old View Premier edition).

The Advanced and Enterprise editions add features such as RDS hosted applications, VSAN and vCOps monitoring amongst other features such as physical desktop image management (aka Mirage).

  

 

When trying to remove a vCenter Server from VMware Horizon View Administrator, all pools and desktops managed via that vCenter server must be deleted first.

 

If they are not, you will get the following warning message and the vCenter server will not be removed:

"The pools and transfer servers associated with this vCenter must be deleted before this vCenter can be removed"

 

 

 

 

Updating the firmware on a Juniper SSG or Netscreen firewall is simple. Here I am going to update a Juniper SSG5 from 6.1.0r2.0 to 6.3.0r16a via the Web UI.

 

Note: This requires a reboot of the firewall device and must be carried out during a maintenance window.

 

1. First you will need go to www.juniper.net and login with a CSC account which is what entitles you to download updates for your specific device.

If you haven't got an account you can register and provide your serial number.

 

 

Much like I did for ThinApp 4, I'm going to create a simple kick start how to series covering how to install ThinApp and capture some applications.

 

VMware ThinApp is an agentless application virtualisation. ThinApp is able to execute applications without them being installed in the operating system. This is achieved by virtualizing resources such as environment variables, files and the Windows registry.

It is also possible to package and run a legacy application from Windows XP on a Windows 7 desktop.

 

File type associations can be configured in the client OS as part of the ThinApp integration, such that opening a .pdf can for example launch a virtualised ThinApp of Adobe Reader.

 

ThinApps can be stored locally on the desktop, made portable on a USB drive or stored on a network share. Furthermore VMware Horizon View can integrate with ThinApp to assign ThinApp applications to virtual desktops.

 

  1. Exclude/Remove Domain in VMware View Administrator, Client and HTML Access with VDMADMIN
  2. Reset/Erase Configuration on Juniper SSG5 Firewall (SSG and NetScreen Devices)
  3. VDI and VMware Horizon View Best Practices and Tips
  4. CentOS 6.5 Upgrade PHP 5.3 to PHP 5.4
  5. Changing the timezone on a linux server (e.g. Red Hat/CentOS)
  6. Migrating/Moving Horizon View Clusters, Hosts and Desktops between vCenter Servers
  7. View HTML Access (Blast) - Your VMware Horizon View server does not support web access
  8. View HTML Access (Blast) - This desktop does not support the requested display protocol

Share this blog post on social media:

Latest Blog Posts

Popular

Social Links

Disclaimer

All advice, installation/configuration how to guides, troubleshooting and other information on this website are provided as-is with no warranty or guarantee. Whilst the information provided is correct to the best of my knowledge, I am not reponsible for any issues that may arise using this information, and you do so at your own risk. As always before performing anything; check, double check, test and always ensure you have a backup.

Copyright ©2008-2021 Andy Barnes - Please do not copy any content including images without prior consent!

Designed and Hosted by Andy Barnes