VMware Horizon Community
BenBrazil
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Using VMWare View Agent with Templates

Hi Alll,

I have built a Windows 2008 VM which I am going to convert into a template. I will be creating multiple VM's from this template and will then connect each VM to VMWare View as a Terminal Service pool. In order to do this I obviously need to install the VMWare View agent. I've included the VMWare View agent into my template, however VMWare View recognises each of the VM's as the same client. I presume that this is because there is some kind of GUID in the registry which needs to be unique on the VM.

Does anyone know how to use the VMWare View agent when installed in a template? Is it just a case of deleting some registry keys and then they get recreated when the VM is next rebooted?

I know this process would normally be handled by the pool creation process within VMWare View, however this is not an option for a 2008 operating system.

Thanks,

Ben.

Reply
0 Kudos
2 Replies
mittim12
Immortal
Immortal

Are you turning it into a template after importing it into View?     In my experience dealing with full desktop templates you just install the agent, shutdown down, convert to template, and then point View to the template.     

Reply
0 Kudos
BenBrazil
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hi,

View wont allow you to create a pool based on a Server OS. I've got many pools created from templates using Client OS's.

So what I have done is to create a template in vCenter and then create VM's from the template using vCenter. Once created I can create a Terminal Services pool for each VM. When installing the View agent in the template, all of the VM's created from the template are seen by View as the same client. If I unistall the View agent from the VM and then reinstall then View will recognise the VM as a new client. This suggests to me that when View handles the creation of the VM's it makes each View agent unique. Using the vCenter templates and customization specifications to provision new VM's it would appear that it doesnt do anything to the View agent to remove its ID or GUID.

I could of course install the agent outside of the template on each VM after it has been created, however I'd like to have the agent inside the template.

Quite often with agents you can remove reg keys to remove the GUID of the agent. When the OS reboots new GUIDs are recreated which make the agent unique from the management backend.

Does anyone know if something equivalent can be done with the VMWare View agent?

Thanks,

Ben

Reply
0 Kudos