I’m working from home this week, on my new “Operations Guide” to VMware Virtual Infrastructure 4. I’ve been on the beta programme for some months – and the main body of the book is more or less completed and in the hands of some top-notch guys from the Forums and elsewhere who are reviewing what I’ve written so far. 

I’m moving off into documenting the brand new features such as Distributed vSwitches and Host Profiles – but before I started on those I turned my attention to adding a VDI chapter to the operations guide. It’s not intended as an all-you-need-to-know chapter – but as a “jumpstart” or “getting started” guide to VMware’s most current VDI offering – VMware View 3. It just so happened that that this time co-incided with the release of Microsoft Windows 7 Beta. 

So this is what I’ve done. I got Windows 7 Beta 64-bit installed and running on ESX4. Then I got VMware Viewer installed and working with VirtualCenter4. That was a big relief. I was worried that perhaps VirtualCenter had changed so much that View3 wouldn’t work. But it worked like a charm right out of the box. I think that’s a good sign that VirtualCenter is stablizing enough that it can change – but older systems that might not have been tested or QA’d agains a new release still function.

It wasn’t all plane sailing. Firstly, Windows 7 doesn’t like the USB Redirection Service which comes as part of the VMware Agent. So I had to opt not to install it. Secondly, the “pass-through” feature didn’t work with Windows 7. Pass-through allows the user to log in to the View Client, and have these credentials passed on to the Windows Virtual Desktop. I suspect that the GINA (the graphical log in DLLs that make up the ctrl+alt-del process) have changed in Windows 7 from Windows Vista – and that as consequence VMware will have to issue an update to the client when they decide to support Windows 7. Thirdly, I decided to install the Window 7 64-bit version. I used Windows Vista 64-bit as the guest operating system during the Windows 7 install – then install the 64-bit edition of VMware Tools. That worked like a charm. Also the VMware Agent installed to Windows 7 64-bit without a problem either. Finally, to get this Windows 7 virtual desktop recognised by VMware View I toggled the guest operating system pull-down list to be the Windows Vista 32-bit Edition. It was only half-way thru this build that I remembered that VMware VDM and View don’t currently support the 64-bit editions of Windows. Still I was able to “blag and bluff” my way round that lack of support/QA…

I’m hoping that Windows 7 might make virtual desktops more popular. Is time goes by its going to become increasingly difficult to hang on to Windows XP. But generally the corporate market has given Vista the thumbs down – not least with its disk and memory footprint. I’m hoping with thinly-provisioned disks being available in Vi4, that business will jump-over Vista – and go striaght from XP to Windows 7. That said I’m still find 2GB RAM is need to make Windows 7 workable….

Anyway, if your interested (?!?!) there are some screen grabs of my installation of Windows 7, and my VMware Viewer configuration…

The Install of Windows 7 to Vi4 Virtual Machine:

The Connection of the View Client to a Windows 7 64-bit Virtual Desktop

This entry was posted on Monday, January 12th, 2009 at 5:51 pm and is filed under VDI. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.