In this part of the installing and configuring VMware Horizon View 6 series we will be installing the VMware View composer database component. The composer component makes it possible for linked clones to be utilised which will drastically reduce your storage space requirements for a VDI deployment.
Composer can be installed either on an existing vCenter server or as its own role on a separate server, in most cases in the real world I’ve seen it deployed on the vCenter server.
The recommended hardware spec’s for a standalone composer server however are 4vCPU’s 2GHZ or faster 8GB’s of RAM and 60GB’s of hard disk space. Of course within your own environment you may want to tweak those up or down depending on the utilisation trend of the composer server.
There is also a database requirement which you will need to create a database on you SQL server before beginning this run through. So get your DBA (if you have one) to create a blank database and assign a service account as the DBO (Database Owner). Keep hold of those service account details as we will be using those later. Also ensure that you have already installed the SQL Native 10 client driver (Found Here) into the composer server as again we will be using that driver to create the connection to SQL.
To install the composer role open the executable downloaded from vmware.com and run it. Click next on the welcome wizard.
Agree to the EULA and click next.
Again click Next past this bit.
Now you will be asked to create a connection to a SQL database. Click the ODBC DSN Setup button then System DSN tab and then Click Add.
Choose SQL Server NativeClient 10.0 as the driver and click Finish.
Give the connection a name that you will reference the connection with inside the composer install wizard (something similar to the database name should be good) and then point the data source to the SQL server and instance in question.
Accept the defaults here and click Next.
Click the change the default database tick box and select your pre-created database which will be automatically enumerated based on the sql instance and server you referenced earlier and click Next.
Again leave the defaults here and click Next.
Finally test your connection by clicking the Test Data Source button and you should quickly see a test successful message appear. If not go back and amend the connection or database based on the output of this window (or just google the error).
Now we are back directly in the composer installation wizard, enter the ODBC connection name you have created in the previous steps and the DBO/service account you have configured for the database and click Next (yes yes I know its not a service account, but its just my lab).
Accept the default port and SSL assignments here and click Next.
Finally Click install to begin the installation.
There you have it, composer is installed and you are ready to begin utilising linked clones within your View environment.
Author: Dale Scriven
