Minimizing the clicks & Better Performance

As some of you may know, I’m a user (and fan) of virtual desktops. I’ve been using a VMware View-based virtual desktop now at EMC for about 2+ years. This works well for me because I use my personal MacBook rather than a company issued laptop. I like to keep that separation between what’s mine and what’s EMC’s. I do all my “EMC” work on the virtual desktop. Email, timecard, etc…

So, when new VMware View clients came out, I jumped over to see what’s new. I’m happy to report that a couple of things caught my eye.

URI Support

The first is the new URI support for the VMware View client. You can now launch the VMware View client from your browser, passing certain characteristics to the client. The URI would be vmware-view://. That was interesting to me as I wanted the ability to launch a URL with the VMware-View URI for specific use cases. Primarily, I wanted to launch the View client with different sizes. One for fitting well on my Macbook Air screen and another when I’m using an external monitor. I looked into the documentation and found this was trivial to set up.

vmware-view://mike@my.view.server.com/MikeF%20Desktop?desktopProtocol=PCoIP&desktopLayout=1280×854

Obviously, I’ve changed the username and server name and desktop name in the above URL. But, as you can see, I can specify the protocol, PCoIP or RDP and the size of the screen, in this case 1280×854. According to the docs and a blog article by Kristina De Nike at VMware you can change all sorts of things. Here’s a list from the blog.

• View Connection Server address
• Port number for View Connection Server
• Active Directory user name
• Radius or RSA SecurID user name
• Domain name
• Desktop display name
• Window size
• Desktop actions including reset, log off and roll back
• Display protocol
• Options for redirecting USB devices

How do I get this so I can just click on a desktop icon, add my password and go? By creating a .URL file using a text editor. This .URL file is understood by both PC and Mac browsers and will do the right thing. Here’s the format:

Copy that into your text editor and save it as a .URL file on your Windows or Mac desktop.

How does this work with things like SecurID? <shameless plug for my employer> It works just fine. When I’m at home and I double-click the icon, I’m prompted for my SecurID credentials and then my Active Directory credentials. When I’m in the office on the corporate LAN, I’m just prompted for my Active Directory credentials. Someday, I would LOVE it if 1Password could fill in the login info, but…

Performance

This now leads me to the second thing I found out with the new VMware View clients. I was originally going to have two .URL files on the deskop. One for RDP and one for PCoIP. The reason being is that I use a USB 2.0 to DVI DisplayLink adapter from Monoprice.

As you can imagine, it doesn’t really have a lot of horsepower for graphics. Earlier VMware View clients for the Mac running PCoIP would choke horribly on this device. I used RDP for the past year when I wanted my virtual desktop on the monitor connected to the USB/DVI adapter. But lo and behold, I started up the new View client using PCoIP on the 2nd monitor and it works beautifully! I don’t know what VMware changed, but I sure am glad it’s working. I can now resize at will and as I write this, I have a View session going at 1440×1024 with great performance!

So, to wrap up, the new VMware View clients make it easier to launch the client just the way you like them and if you’re using DisplayLink devices like the Monoprice adapter and the DisplayLink 1.8 drivers you’ll get decent performance to boot.

I hope this was helpful. Please share your comments!

thanks,

mike