Virtually Jason

Yeah, I know that this isn’t Virtualization related, but I scoured the internet over the weekend and wasn’t able to come up with this bit of data (and so had to go the trial-and-error route)… and this is my best venue for adding it to the Google Index.  If you’re building a piano stand for a Yamaha P-95 B digital piano, you will need 4 very specific bolts in order to attach it to the stand.  Those bolts are standard 10-32, and the threaded holes on the bottom of the piano are at least an inch deep.  No, I'm not mechanically inclined and no, I don't know what those numbers mean besides a nebulous concept of "size".  And now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

You’ve rolled out a shiny new VDI solution, but most of your user base is on good physical desktops that don’t need replacing… and that you don’t have the budget to replace with thin clients yet.  What do you do?  I think that most VDI rollouts get to the point where they’re asking that question eventually.  There are two main answers that you get (ignoring the “replace them anyway!” opinion).  You can run your View Client as an Application on the desktop or you can run it as the desktop’s Shell.  In my opinion, they are both viable solutions... but they both certainly have drawbacks.  Let’s talk about the Application option first. The View Client is an application, just like any other.  That means that you can place a shortcut on the user’s desktop and, after they sign in, they can start it and log in to their VDI Desktop.  If they user needs to get out of their VDI Desktop, it’s very obvious that they can simply minimize the window (or even c...

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 clie...