Setting up View 5 Connection Server for the 1st time

Quick Recap of what we’ve done so far:

• 1st – we installed Windows SQL 2008 R2 inside a Windows 2008 R2 server.
• 2nd – we setup the VMware View 5 Database inside that SQL Server
• 3rd – we setup our ODBC connection for View 5 inside the vCenter Server
• 4th – We troubleshooted View 5 ODBC Connection Servers
  
• 5th  – we installed VMware View Composer 2.7.0 inside our Windows vCenter 5 server.
• 6th – we installed VMware View 5 connection server in vSphere 5

The next part of the Connection Broker install is to setup your vCenter and Composer credentials.    As with a lot of VMware’s new management user interfaces, everything is moving towards a Adobe Flex client to manage.  This is great because it frees you up from having to install management applications on your device.  It also makes it really handy to manage your View environment from just about any browser in any VM you happen to be in !!  VERY COOL.  Anyway, lets get back to the topic at hand. 

Here is a quick list of things I’ll be taking you through during this part.

• We will add our vCenter Credentials into View Manager.
• We will hop over to our AD server and setup a new Organizational Unit and create 2 new Groups to manage.
• We will add one of the groups (Admin) to the View Manager Admin group.

 

1. First lets log in to the View Administrator console. You can do that from a any computer/browser that is on your network.  Simple point to your ViewServer name with a /admin at the end.

 

 

2. This is your main admin screen.  This is where you will spend a lot of your time managing your VMware View 5 environment. 

3. Let’s add our vCenter credentials into View – Expand the View Configuration Information and then click Add under the vCenter Servers area.

4. Enter in your vCenter information and credentials.  Once you have that populated you should see a small hour glass and then you can click on Enable View Composer which we installed in a previous blog post.

5. For the composer information, just put in your domain info, no need to add the server name.  Then enter in the vCenter credentials again since that’s where it’s installed.

6. When you are done, you should see your vCenter information populate under the vCenter Servers area. 

Setting up new OU and Groups in AD

Adding an Administrator group can be very handy if you have multiple people that need to have this level of access.  The easiest way to manage these users is through a group.  First thing you need to do is log into your Active Directory server and setup a few things:

1. RDP into your AD server and click on Start/Programs/Administrative Tools/Active Directory Users and Computers.  Then right click on your domain, click on new and add an Organization Unit.

2. In this case, I’m going to add an OU called View 5

3. Once you are done with that, lets right click on that new OU and go to New – Group and create a new Group inside the OU

4. I’m going to create 2 groups for now.  One for Admin’s and one for general users.  This way when I start to “entitling” users to desktops I can use a group instead of individual names.

5. When you are done you should see 2 new groups.

6. Lets add some users into the groups so double click on a group and click Members and then ADD and add a couple of users.

7. Do the same thing for the View5Users group.

Now lets go back to our View Admin screen and add the new View5Admin group to the list of admins on the console.

1. A couple of lines below the place we added the vCenter info is the Administrators link.  Click on that.

2. Click on the Add User or Group button

3. Click on the Add button on the bottom of the screen

4. Do a quick search for View and that should populate some information below.  In this case I’m going to just select the View5GroupAdmin one. Then click OK

5. You should now see that group added to the list.  Click next

6. Here is where we can assign the level of permissions we want to give this group.  In my case I simply gave them Admin level – you can pick and choose depending on your use case.

7. Check the box to give the admin group rights to the root.

8. Now you should see your group added.

Easy Peasy

 

So now that we have the Connection server all squared away, we need to go create our desktop to use.  Let’s move on to “Installing View 5 Desktop Agent in Windows 7 64bit OS”.

@vTexan