Converting Desktops to View Clients


One of my customers asked me to convert some of their physical Windows desktops into dedicated VDI Clients.  A quick google search revealed a VMware Blog post with some basic instructions.  They’re written up for Windows XP, but they work fine for a Windows 7 Client as well.  Basically, you just change the registry on the client machine to run a VBS script that calls a batch file that starts the View Client, instead of starting up the normal Explorer shell in Windows.  It’s a very easy change to make and, while it’s quick and dirty, it does what it’s designed to do.  I use a slightly modified view.cmd file, as seen below.

Rather than just starting an infinite loop that keeps the View Client running, this version will allow a user to actually log off of their client device when the View Client closes.  If not for that change, when they log out of VDI, they’re right back at their desktop selection screen, since the user is still logged in to the client device (which causes some security concerns).  This version also enables USB Auto Connect both on startup and insertion, thus saving my users some small headache.

@echo off
set path=C:\program files\vmware\vmware view\client\bin;%path%
:View
start /w "" wswc.exe -connectUSBOnStartup true -ConnectUSBOninsert true -serverURL <my connection server>
IF ERRORLEVEL 0 GOTO LOGOFF
goto View
:LOGOFF
LOGOFF

In case of troubleshooting after this conversion, what do you do?  Simple - you can still minimize your View Client, there's just nothing there with which to interact.  You can still do a ctrl-alt-del though and open up Task Manager.  From there, just go to File -> New Task (Run...) and run whatever local program you need.  If it comes down to it, just start up regedit and change the shell back to explorer.exe, then log out (once again, from the ctrl-alt-del screen) and back in.  In Windows 7 at least, a log out is all that it takes to pick up that change.

Comments

Post a Comment

Sorry guys, I've been getting a lot of spam recently, so I've had to turn on comment moderation. I'll do my best to moderate them swiftly after they're submitted,

Popular posts from this blog

PowerShell Sorting by Multiple Columns

PowerShell's Sort-Object cmdlet is super useful, especially when preparing output for human consumption.  A few people have found my blog while looking for more information about its use, specifically while looking for how to sort by multiple columns (well, properties, technically).  I've never done so (much less written about it), so I hope those folks found answers elsewhere.  But, it got me curious... and it turns out that it's really easy. The Technet article on Sort-Object has the answer directly spelled out: just use commas to create a list of properties to sort by (in order to precedence).  Let's look at some examples!  First, prepare a variable with some good sortable data: $myData = get-eventlog System -newest 25 And then we can get to sorting!  Say you want to sort primarily by EntryType (Warning, Information, Error) and then by Source.  Easy-peasy: $myData | sort EntryType,Source How about if you want it to be in descending order?  Yeah, there&
Read more

Clone a Standard vSwitch from one ESXi Host to Another

One of my customers is standardizing the configurations on their HP C7000 enclosures (they've been set up at various sites by various administrators with varying involvement from the architecture team).  As such, we need to stand up some temporary resources so that we can take down the main enclosure for reconfiguration.  That's fine, we can easily ship a smaller enclosure to each site for temporary compute resources.  Some of the sites are using Standard vSwitches, so we need to be able to quickly copy the networking configuration over from their existing blades to these new, slightly different blades.  As I see it, we had 2 good options: 1) Capture a Host Profile with the desired vSwitch configuration.  Delete every other component of the Host Profile so that only the networking section is applied; design the new ESXi hosts so that the vSwitches'll work with the old vmnic-to-vswitch configurations. 2) Write a script to clone the vSwitch from ones ESXi host to another.
Read more

Deleting Orphaned (AKA Zombie) VMDK Files

A problem that most Virtualization Administrators need to deal with is Orphaned VMDK files (or Zombie VMDK files, as some people call them).  These are Virtual Machine hard drive files that are just hanging out, taking up storage, but are attached to no VMs.  How can this happen?  Well, the most common way is when an administrator needs to delete a VMDK but isn't quite ready to commit... so, after pressing "remove", they select "remove from virtual machine" rather than "remove and delete files".  The intent is always good: "I want to be able to restore this if it turns out to be necessary... so I'll just come back and delete it next week if nothing breaks!"  But, of course, next week something else happens and the file doesn't get deleted.  After a little while, it turns into "which files did I rename, again?" and nothing seems to happen. So, how do you deal with these orphaned files?  Well, a few years ago I found a scrip
Read more