Horizon Desktop: Physical Desktop Management

The increased need to allow employees to work from home may be putting stress on your Horizon Desktop infrastructure. One quick fix for quickly scaling up the resources available to employees is managing your physical desktops with VMware Horizon. In the past physical desktop management in Horizon has been a time-consuming task. Installing the agent, adding the desktop to a manual pool and then entitling the desktop to the end user all had to be done by hand.  

Not anymore! VMware scripting and API guru Chris Halstead (Twitter) and Andy Morgan (Twitter) have worked together and created a set of scripts to make the process much easier.  

The Deployment Instructions

Andy’s script (found here – https://github.com/andyjmorgan/HorizonRemotePCHelperScripts) installs the Horizon Agent on the physical machine. You can push the right info after the agent install to a .csv file.  

Once you have the Agent installed, you can take Chris’ program (found here – https://github.com/chrisdhalstead/horizon-physical-machines) and create a manual pool.  Then, use the .csv file to add the computers with the installed Horizon Agent and entitle them to the primary user.  

There are a few things that you will need to check to make sure your remote workers will be able to connect to the remote machines.  

1. Make sure you adjust your firewall rules to allow your UAG servers to connect to the VLAN that your physical desktops are on. If you followed best practices when setting up your Horizon environment the UAG servers should only be able to talk to the VLAN that the virtual desktops are on. Double check and expand that firewall rule to the physical desktop VLAN.
2. Make sure that the manual pool is configured to use Blast Extreme as the default display protocol. You are required to have a physical PCoIP card in the desktop to use PCoIP.  

Hit us up in the chat window if you are struggling to get this off the ground. We’ll help get this off the ground alongside you.

Researching Other Options

In our previous post, we included 4 other strategies for meeting the needs of your mobile workforce. Feel free to pay it a visit. Several manufacturers are working to ease the burden of gaining access to the toolsets necessary to support this sudden shift. For instance, Cisco has made several licenses available for an interim basis to help this work from home shift.

As always, we are here to help. Our resources have the toolsets ready to support any enterprise networking, end user compute and identity management needs that may have recently taken priority. Please contact us and we can help to accelerate getting your workers enabled to work remotely.