VMware View 5.1 Deployed

I took this week after classes finished to tear down our View 4.6 cloud that was hosted on vsphere 4.1 ESX servers and redeploy it properly with a dedicated vCenter server, upgrade the vmware environment to 5.0 U1 and then roll out a new View 5.1 environment.

A few quick observations for those planning upgrades. Read the installation, administration, and upgrade manuals completely and make notes of all the changes or ancillary upgrades you may need to do.

I ran into a couple of hiccups but nothing too painful.

The security server wouldn’t link with the connection server until we opened up the extra ports in our DMZ firewall and had IPsec encapsulation enabled. Yes, it’s clearly documented – it just needed to be read. Oh and the installer says you can use the IP or FQDN of the connection server while installing the security server – don’t use IPs. Use the FQDN and make sure that your security servers can resolve the FQDN of the connection server.

Make sure you have a good public cert if you’ll be letting anyone outside your organization connect. If not, bone up on running a certificate authority in your network. You should already be deploying internal certs to your servers and workstations.

I’m digging the new features like host caching (2GB of server ram dedicated to caching storage… Zoom!) and finally an OS X client that does PCoIP and doesn’t require Microsoft’s RDP client.

I just finished deploying new thinclient images with View 5.1 clients and the new root CA. The wildcard cert we purchased in February from GeoTrust was great… Except the HP thinclients didn’t have GeoTrust’s root cert so the entire view environment was Untrusted and the clients just failed to connect.

Tomorrow I start deploying Win 7 desktops…