View Kiosk Mode with Windows ThinPC

[mbletschin]

Has anyone use Kiosk Mode of View 5 in conjunction with repurposed PCs with Windows ThinPC?  I am looking for a way to have some old machines reused in a public access environment with View 5 in kiosk mode.  We have access to ThinPC, but want to be able to have 0 user authentication needed to access the machines.  Has anyone done this or seen a process to do such? 

[mittim12]

To be terrible honest I never see many Kisok Mode questions around the forum.  I'm not sure if there is a low adopotion rate or if they simply don't post anything.   

[gunnarb]

Yes this is doable, but its all about putting a flag in a command line.  What you will want to do is something like:

wswc.exe -domainName <domain> -userName <username> -password <password> -desktopName <PoolName> -desktopProtocol <PCoIP/RDP> -unattended.

I'll post all the flags on my blog in just a minute.

Gunnar Berger

[gunnarb]

And now its documented!

http://communities.vmware.com/people/gunnarb/blog/2012/01/05/vmware-view-client-kiosk-mode-and-other...

Gunnar

[mbletschin]

Definitely looking forward to reading the blog post. I have not done alot with Kiosk mode (hardly any actually) so this is going to be a challenge and I need to be able to explain it to an engineer actually performing the deployment. Thanks

[gunnarb]

The blog is nothing special just putting the flags out there so people can google them.  All you'll end up doing is creating a batch file that has all the flags in it to launch the correct desktop.  It's not very flexiable, but hopefully your basic kiosk doesn't need to be.

Gunnar

[mittim12]

That's really just the command line parameters and not the same as the View Kisok mode, correct?    I remember when studying for my VCP-DT going over where you had to create AD objects, associate mac address with users, etc for Kisok mode.

http://pubs.vmware.com/view-50/topic/com.vmware.ICbase/PDF/view-50-administration.pdf     Page 348 is what I was thinking about.  

[gunnarb]

Mittim's response is spot on as far as setting up Kiosk mode, I guess I was responding to how you do it on the client side which the documentation seems to be lacking (even in that document).  That area in the document is more refering to how on the AD side you setup the accounts be it the CUSTOM- or MAC accounts using the vdmadmin command line (which is in the VCP-DT as he references).  On page 357 you see only a couple examples of the actual client setup I was refering to.  What I did in my post was just show all the client options not just the few that they show in the Admin Guide.

So ya, Mittim is spot on, I was just trying to show additional details that I don't think are shared in the Admin Guide.

Gunnar