ThinkVirt

Have you ever wanted to carry around a desktop or laptop in your pocket? If so, I hope you have some uber-cool cargo pants with reinforced stitching.

For the rest of us, there have been a slew of mobile apps enabling devices such as Blackberries and iPhones to RDP/VNC into a server or desktop.

That's lovely, but I've been knee-deep in VDI solutions lately and one of the questions that's come up a few times is, "I don't know where my PC is going to be, but I need to access it from my phone to execute a specific task or to retrieve data that must reside in my corporate datacenter." Or, people want to run an application that requires more horsepower than their mobile device can handle.

After 8 semi-painful years of Blackberry & Sprint, I recently made the switch to ATT and an iPhone. So far, so good.

I installed Wyse PocketCloud in a matter of seconds and then fumbled through the configuration.

The configuration is pretty straight forward. You will need to change the setting to Accept all certificates to browse your Active Directory domain, if the cert isn't already loaded.

Once you enter in the View Manager server details, your username/password and the user's domain, you are then presented with your desktop resources (managed through the Entitlements section in the View Admin console).

Here I have selected, "JML_PCOIP" (although it will actually use RDP to connect, pay no attention to the name).

Here are all the major settings to get VMware View up and running:

Once the VMware View connection is saved in Wyse PocketCloud, it will show up as follows:

Low and behold, the power of a clean and functional interface! My desktop pool was set to Suspend virtual machines after a set period of time, so I had to wait all of 20 seconds for my desktop to boot and then I was in.

Seamless login works fine, so I don't have to re-enter my credentials:

And here you can see the Wyse PocketCloud toolbar at the bottom along with my desktop (running TweetDeck at the moment).

Response time on the corporate wifi is very good. A colleague of mine, Andy Murphy, just yelled that connectivity via our VPN also works really well, with a few minor pauses here and there.

I will most likely use this app for demonstration purposes, but it's a great way to show the flexibility of a virtual desktop. My phone could be stolen and all of my data and work that I executed on my corporate virtual desktop would still reside in the corporate data center.

Yet another great use for VMware View, and a great job to Wyse for keeping with one of the advantages VMware has in the VDI front - ease of use!