General Installation Guidelines VDI

The following guidelines apply to all installations types (new installations and upgrades).

• Synchronize time — Make sure that you have synchronized time across VDM Connection Server and desktop virtual machines. By default, virtual machines pick up the time from the ESX host at boot up and you may have to synchronize time on the ESX hosts through the ntpd service.
• Validate your Internet Explorer settings — VDM Client uses Microsoft Internet Explorer� internet settings, including proxy settings, when connecting to VDM Connection Server. Ensure that your Internet Explorer settings are accurate and that you can access the VDM Connection Server URL through Internet Explorer.
• Before creating an automatically provisioned desktop pool, do the following:
  • Validate the VirtualCenter guest customization specification if you intend to use one — Make sure that the guest customization specification in VirtualCenter is accurate. You should use VirtualCenter to deploy and customize a VM from your template using that customization specification and fully test the resulting VM (in other words, DHCP, authentication) before using that customization specification in VDM Administrator.
  • Validate network ports on ESX — Make sure you have a sufficient number of ports on the virtual switch which is used for the guest VMs. The default value for ESX server is 24; it may not be sufficient when creating a large pool of desktop VMs.
• Install required Microsoft Windows patches — For Windows XP desktop VMs, make sure you have RDP patches referenced by Microsoft Knowledge Base (KB) articles 323497 and 884020. Failure to do this may result in a Windows Sockets failed error message on the client. You can find these KB articles at the following URLs:
  • http://support.microsoft.com/kb/323497
  • http://support.microsoft.com/kb/884020
• It is recommended that you upgrade VDM Client machines to use Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) 6.0 — This recommendation applies to machines running Windows XP and Windows XPe. Windows 2000 does not support RDC 6.0.Windows Vista comes with RDC 6.0 installed.RDC 6.0 can be downloaded at the following Microsoft download site: Microsoft downloads
• VDM does not support using link-local (169.254.x.x) addresses for desktop virtual machines — Configure desktop virtual machines to use DHCP or static IP addresses.