Assigning pools based on physical location or IP of client?

[allenb1121]

We are investigating using VMware View as a student lab solution for multiple colleges at one university (with thin clients).  Ideally, what we would like to do is to centrally manage the View environment, and to delegate permission for the individual lab managers for the colleges to maintain their images.  This would be a linked-clone setup with no persistent disks, BTW.  The students will all be authenticated from one Active Directory.

Is there a way to ensure that when a student logs in, the correct desktop for the physical location is presented?  All I can find is a way to associate a user id to a pool or desktop.

Here is an example of what I want to accomplish:

Let's say the Engineering department and the Biology department both have a computer lab, and they have different specialized software that must be available in each lab.  Students must be able to log into both labs with the same set of credentials, and potentially any of the other 20+ labs.  When the student logs in to a thin client in the Biology department, the desktop should be from the pool specific to that lab, and when that same student logs into a thin client in the Engineering lab, the engineering pool desktops should be prevented.  Presenting the student with a list to scroll through on login is not really an option.

So far, I can find no way to make that happen.  Each lab will have a unique range of IP addresses, so if there were a way to determine the pool presented based on pool IP address, that would work.

Is there any solution to this issue that I am overlooking?  All I can find is a way to associate the user to a pool or to multiple pools, and present a selection list at login.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.  I'm afraid that if we can't work this out, the entire project will not happen.

Allen Beddingfield

Systems Engineer

The University of Alabama

[allenb1121]

It seems that what I want to accomplish may be possible by using tags/restricting pools to dedicated connection servers.  After searching for that for hours, how ironic that I ran across that potential solution within minutes of posing the question.  Now, I will slightly modify my inquiry:

Are any of you using tags to restrict pool access to particular connection servers, and how well is that working for you?

Thanks.

Allen Beddingfield

Systems Engineer

The University of Alabama

[vmblogza]

Hi

Well this is a really interesting question and I hope to see what we can do to help you.

The 1st thing that I can tell you is that you are probably going to be using Floating Linked-Clone Pools to make this happen.

You can then use Tags to seperate the diffirent Networks from each other. We use this and it works we seperate our Internat / External networks so that the users connecting from "outside" get assigned diffirent desktops from then they are internally working.

Also if you want to do this Just some advice that if you will be deploying to a campus and trust me I have done 2 deployments you have to design this solution perfectly.

Make use of VMware PSO ( Professional Services) they are really good and gave me some solid advice. They can design the whole infrastructure for you and will give you documentation on how to implement that step by step.

Hope this helps

[allenb1121]

Thanks for the advice.  Yes, we have been engaged with VMware and our storage vendor from early on in the planning phase.  This IP restriction scenario was one that no one has thought of until today.  I sent a message of to one of our contacts at VMware, but today is a national holiday in the U.S., so I'm pretty sure they are out of the office.

Before we plod ahead too much farther, we will get them to review our revised implementation plans again.

Allen Beddingfield

Systems Engineer

The University of Alabama

[BZatWS]

There is a ViewClient command line switch "desktopname" that specifies a pool  ex: wswc.exe -desktopname=BioLab.  You could include this in a script.  The switch is a little misleading because it sounds like you are selecting a specific VM instead of a Pool name.

We are a K-12 and use this command in a .vbs script on the physical machine that we run in place of explorer.exe (the Windows desktop) so students only see the View login screen and are sent directly to a specific pool after entering their credentials.

I think I found the basic idea by googleing "repurposing Windows desktops" then we customized further to fit our goals which is a longer story...

[calladd]

I am reading this and trying to think of ways to address it.  The first idea that came to my mind was:

One option that may work, but seems to my thinking to be alot of overhead would be to setup multiple connection brokers.  Have a connection broker for each location that has control of the associated desktop pool.  Set the thin-client and/or workstations in each department to connect to it's specific broker.

This would basically mean having a connection broker for each lab environment.

[vmblogza]

Hi,

I have thought about this and just do the following.

Create Diffirent Pools for the departments with their software they need as per usual.

Now say I am attending a Biology Class like BIO225 they will have a specific username/password that all the students will use in that class. This will not be a security problem as you lock down the VM's just to run the software required.

You entitlement will only allow those users to access that specific desktop because when they connect to view that is all they will see.

[calladd]

You could expand this by setting up each device with it's own username/password that is will autologin to the Connection broker with and autoconnect to a specific pool.  So you would be moving the focus from the Student to the device.

[calladd]

Another option you may want to explore is running the View client in Kiosk mode.

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/VMware-View-KioskMode-WP-EN.pdf