New Changes to VMware View Aeries

I wanted to take a moment to list out the couple of changes that I made to the Aeries VM, and to establish a couple of terminologies that we get our users accustomed to.

First, since there’s been a lot of talk about the Aeries Reload not showing any progress that the users can see, I went ahead and added a progress bar, as a bonus, in the title bar of the window, it will show how many files are being copied, and the progress of those files as the copy is performed. so I hope this will satisfy that requirement.

Also, on the top section of the wallpaper, where there is the user information, it also now shows the version of the VM.

 

I have added 3 permanent environment variables into the VM itself that we’d be able to query:

%VMVERSION% : points to the version of the virtual machine image, including any backend, logon, logoff, menu changes, GPO, etc …

%AERIESVERSION% : keeps track of the update of the Aeries application residing in c:\AeriesCS.

%VERSION% : points to the actual full version of the VM combining the former 2 versions.

The Aeries version does not currently reflect the current Aeries versioning system. I’d be willing to do so, if this would be helpful for the programmers. At this point, the version numbering has to be changed either manually, or through a script, and is not yet automated, however, changing it is quite easy, and I’ll be doing it when I’m applying Aeries updates to the VMs.

Regarding the version:

I have made the version number logically composed of both of the version component variables. This will help us, at a glance to figure out what distribution of the VM is running.

Currently the version is: 0.50.1.00: (%VERSION%)

0.50 (%VMVERSION%) refers to the version of the VM. (still in Beta, hasn’t reached a 1.0 version).

1.00 (%AERIESVERSION%): Is the (my) version of Aeries. We can change this to the actual distro version of Aeries if necessary.

In addition, from here on out, I will be including the version number of the VM in its description on the listing of the View Client.

 

 

 

I am planning to always keep a pool with 1 version older than the current as a quick way to revert back, in case something goes wrong. The backup pool will always be disabled, but available for quick deployment.

Unless there is a strong objection to this method, I would like that we start getting our users used to this new nomenclature of the AeriesCS pool naming, as this will be constantly changing as we make updates to the VMs; as I’ve seen users call the helpdesk if something as small as “dot” changes from what they’re used to normally seeing ..

The last change to this version is regarding the switch of protocol from RDP to PCoIP. I have been testing this for the past couple of days with the new version of VMware View, and it has been working quite well. (The initial issue with PCoIP had to do with printers not mapping, though this seems to have been resolved, and printers are mapping consistently with this protocol).

One of the nicest advantages for PCoIP pertaining to our users is the ability to dynamically resize their Aeries screen without having to change the resolution. So, the VM will essentially act just like another application on their desktop. The only thing they would need to do in order to be able to resize the window is choose “Small Windows” or “Large Window” when logging in to Aeries (From the “ Display “ dropdown – seen below –) , and this should show the resize handles.

As a fall back, I have made the RDP protocol available anyway for now, until we are fully confident that PCoIP is reliable for production environment.

 

 

For any questions/comments, please talk to me.

• This change was made on 05/17/2010