Friday Tips #3
- by Chris Kawalek
Even though yesterday was Thanksgiving here in the US, we still have a Friday tip for those of you around your computers today. In fact, we have two! The first one came in last week via our #AskOracleVirtualization Twitter hashtag. The tweet has disappeared into the ether now, but we remember the gist, so here it is:
Question:
Will there be an Oracle Virtual Desktop Client for Android?
Answer by our desktop virtualization product development team: We are looking at Android as a supported platform for future releases.
Question:
How can I make a Sun Ray Client automatically connect to a virtual machine?
Answer by Rick Butland, Principal Sales Consultant, Oracle Desktop Virtualization: Someone recently asked how they can assign VM’s to specific Sun Ray Desktop Units (“DTU’s”) without any user interfaction being required, without the “Desktop Selector” being displayed, or any User Directory. That is, they wanted each Sun Ray to power on and immediately connect to a pre-assigned Solaris VM.
This can be achieved by using “tokens” for user assignment – that is, the tokens found on Smart Cards, DTU’s, or OVDC clients can be used in place of user credentials. Note, however, that mixing “token-only” assignments and “User Directories” in the same VDI Center won’t work.
Much of this procedure is covered in the documentation, particularly here. But it can useful to have everything in one place, “cookbook-style”:
1. Create the “token-only” directory type:
From the VDI administration interface, select:
“Settings”, “Company”, “New”, select the “None” radio button, and click “Next.”
Enter a name for the new “Company”, and click “Next”, then “Finish.”
2. Create Desktop Providers, Pools, and VM’s as appropriate.
3. Access the Sun Ray administration interface at http://servername:1660 and login using “root” credentials, and access the token-id’s you wish to use for assignment. If you’re using DTU tokens rather than Smart Card tokens, these can be found under the “Tokens” tab, and “Search-ing” using the “Currently Used Tokens” tab. DTU’s can be identified by the prefix “psuedo.” For example:
4. Copy/paste this token into the VDI administrative interface, by selecting “Users”, “New”, and pasting in the token ID, and click “OK” - for example:
5. Assign the token (DTU) to a desktop, that is, in the VDI Admin Gui, select “Pool”, “Desktop”, select the VM, and click "Assign" and select the token you want, for example:
In addition to assigning tokens to desktops, you'll need to bypass the login screen. To do this, you need to do two things:
1. Disable VDI client authentication with:
/opt/SUNWvda/sbin/vda settings-setprops -p clientauthentication=Disabled
2. Disable the VDI login screen – to do this, add a kiosk argument of "-n" to the Sun Ray kiosk arguments screen. You set this on the Sun Ray administration page - "Advanced", "Kiosk Mode", "Edit", and add the “-n” option to the arguments screen, for example:
3. Restart both the Sun Ray and VDI services:
# /opt/SUNWut/sbin/utstart –c # /opt/SUNWvda/sbin/vda-service restart
Remember, if you have a question for us, please post on Twitter with our hashtag (again, it's #AskOracleVirtualization), and we'll try to answer it if we can. See you next time!
