With the launch of VMware Horizon View 6.1 Cloud Pod arcitecture came to the forefront by way of additions to the GUI. Cloud Pod first really came about in version 6 however it was a command line only implimentation much of the initial setup and configuration now has a GUI element within the 6.1 View Manager which will please many however home sites have yet to make that transition.
Home sites allow you to specify where a User or Group will be directed in a healthy environment irrespective of their actual connection server entry point. For example if you have 2 sites one based in London and the other in Glasgow even if someone from London village authenticates into a connection server located within Glasgow then their desktop session will still come from London because that has been specified as their home site.
As mentioned before however this has not quite made it to the GUI yet, or at least I’ve not found it yet and trust me I’ve looked!
So in order to set up a homesite for a User or Group you will need to drop into a dos box on a connection server and enter in the below:
lmvutil –createUserHomeSite –userName domain.local\user –siteName London
The above command links a User to a particular site within the Cloud Pod architecture however of course using individual Users is never a good idea which is why preferrably you would set up a specific group within Active Directory and link the group to a home site. The command is as below:
lmvutil –createGroupHomeSite –userName domain.local\user –siteName London
In addition to the parameters above you will also need to authenticate in order to execute the command so you will need to add the following to the command line
–authAs domain.local\user –authPassword Password
Theres also a switch for entering the domain (–authDomain) but I’ve found that it works perfectly fine entering the domain details in authAs. So an entire command line process for assigning a group to a home site might consist of the following.
lmvutil –createGroupHomeSite –userName vhorizon.test\londonGRP –siteName London –authAs vhorizon.test\administrator –authPassword Password1
In addition to this you can also add the –entitlementName switch which will bind the home site configuration to the global pool entitlement you have created for the dedicated/floating pools. This can be pretty useful if you would like to have a different home site for dedicated and floating pools for example but as this feature is still fairly unobviously positioned within the View configuration its a good idea to keep it as simple as possible in order to aid troubleshooting down the line.
By creating home sites for Users or Groups you then are able to easily ensure that users are able to logon to desktops within pools that are closest to their data in a normal day to day operation.
I’m very excited about Cloud Pod as at the moment it really is a great technology and one area where VMware Horizon View really shines over and above XenDesktop at the moment as its really flexible and allows for a very simple configuration of Active/Active and Active/Passive desktop configurations whereas the XenDesktop Multisite configuration is a little clunky still.
Author: Dale Scriven
