ThinkVirt

Late last week I was involved with a VMware View 4 + Samsung zero client solution and I thought I would give a quick overview of the Teradici Management Console for those that haven't seen it yet.

The Teradici Management Console is used to manage zero client assets in the enterprise. For example, zero clients running pre-3.x firmware could not be enabled for VMware View connectivity until they were upgraded. If you have 1 or 2 zero clients, you can manually update the firmware without too much trouble.

However, what do you do if you have 300 zero clients? Teradici Management Console is the answer.

I'm using Samsung zero client monitors with Teradici goodness inside:

To get started you simply download the virtual appliance (in .vmdk format) and import it with vCenter.

Total import time for me was under 5 minutes. Molto bene!

The first thing to do is determine how you want to discover the zero clients. By far, the easiest is to discover by an IP range.

Here you can see that it found the one zero client I had powered on at the moment. You will also notice that it is UNGROUPED.

• Groups are used to apply settings to a collection of zero clients. These settings can include everything from performance tweaks to gold profile application.

When you click on the device itself, you see basic details, including IP/DNS info:

Here you can see the group I created, "Briefing Center."

Here's an overview of the multitude of settings you can tweak. These can be changed on a per device basis, or more ideal, on a per group basis.

USB Authorization settings:

One of the most useful settings is entering the configuration settings so that the zero clients can talk to VMware View Manager. Again, with the Teradici Management Console, I simply edit these settings in the profile, then apply the profile to the group.

Here you can see the gold standard profile has been applied to my Briefing Center group. The ideal way to manage collections of zero clients.

Now that we have associated a profile with a group, we can see that we have 1 client with it unapplied. So, time to click, "Apply Profile."

Once I have my final profile settings made (working on solution profiles based on user classification), I will share the settings here.