View / VDI, Novell and ZenWorks

[Richard_Gardner]

Hi All, I'm looking at getting linked clones in a non-persistent pool to work with Novell Zenworks and the Desktop Management. Part of this is that the workstations import themselves into e-Directory thus enabling applications to be associated and workstation policies. The Active Directory side is working fine, and the Novell client is all working, in that when a user entitled to use a desktop accesses via the portal they will be automatically logged into the virtual desktop. The bit I am struggling with is to get the workstations imported into e-Directory. I have tried wirting a post synchronization script that will reboot the virtual desktop and then automatically login as a user and import this into e-Directory and then automatically logout and is then ready to use. This works when I manually run the script, but when I enter this into View Administrator and enable the pool nothing visibly happens and the log files on the virtual desktop are giving me no indication of what might be happening or not.

Does anyone out there have any useful information on how the post synchronization scripts run, or anyone tried what I'm doing and suceeded?

Any ideas will be gratefully received. Thanks, Richard

[ant_uk]

Hi,

What we do is remove the workstation from eDirectory before creating the 'gold image' template. As a result when the first eDirectory users logs in after clone is built and sysprep has ran (I'm assuming you're using sysprep to rename your machines), the clone is registered in the DS with the new name. The command we use for this is:

"C:\Program Files\Novell\Zenworks\zwsreg.exe" -unreg

What we've failed to do (so far) is get the View client to pass the details on to the Novell client, so we can have a single sign-on...

HTH

Anthony

[TomHowarth]

Have a read of this blog post http://www.thatsmyview.net/2009/06/05/how-to-use-novell-with-vmware-view/

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Tom Howarth VCP / vExpert

VMware Communities User Moderator

Blog: www.planetvm.net

Contributing author for the upcoming book "[VMware vSphere and Virtual Infrastructure Security: Securing ESX and the Virtual Environment|http://my.safaribooksonline.com/9780136083214]”. Currently available on roughcuts

[admin]

Anthony,

please could you tell me more aboutyour solution and how you did it? That sounds interesting ...

Regards,

Christoph

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Blog:

http://communities.vmware.com/blogs/dommermuth |

[ant_uk]

Hi Tom,

Yep, that's what I did before (the registry keys come from Novell's support document 7002540). It's been a little while since I've played with it, perhaps it's time for another go.

Anthony

[ant_uk]

Hi Christoph,

There's not much more to it really. For our physical PCs we build XP, configure it how we like, then before we create the image/template we remove the workstation from the DS using the command I mentioned before and run sysprep. For our vitual desktops we don't run sysprep, but have VMware View do it for us when the VMs are cloned from the template.

Anthony

[admin]

Are you using context-less login?

[ant_uk]

Yep...

[Jalenn]

Hi All

We have been running as per above for the last 12 months with ZDM client and VMware VIew without any hitches. I am looking at now migrating to ZCM and wondering if anyone else has any success with embedding the ZCM client and it registering correctly with a non persistant composed pool?

Cheers

JK