View 4.5 is Alive!

So I finally had to make time to put in View 4.5 on my 2 test Datacenters (one is a Demo environment, the other for play).

Went in like a breeze on both. Run the installer for View Manager, update the View Composer, and boom. I'm up to 4.5.

The only real issue I ran into was with my existing XP Linked Clone pool on my test Datacenter (the Demo datacenter was fine...). I went in and removed and re-added the View Agent and updated my Snap and pointed the Pool to it. No joy. I got a blank screen.

Did some research, and saw some notes about ESX 4.0u2 with View 4.0 causing this issue, so I thought I'd start there.
Here's two links I found:
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1016753
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1022830

Besides, I felt like updating the datacenters to ESX 4.1 anyway, since I had held off because View 4.0 doesn't like ESX 4.1.

So I went through and upgraded vCenter, vCenter Update Manger, then used Update Manager to update my hosts. If you've not used Update Manager for it, you should - it's cool to watch. Apply your baseline with 4.1, tell it to remediate, and sit back and enjoy. That is, assuming of course, that all of your vms can migrate on their own (aka, you don't have them attached to CD drives, etc).

So once I had them updated, I once again updated my vmTools on the XP image, removed and readded the View Agent for good measure, then updated my Snap and Linked Clones. Still no joy.

So I though, ok, maybe something is wrong with my pool.

I created a new desktop pool (based off the same Snap) and it worked!

Since these were just Demo/Test datacenters, I just blew away my old pools and created new ones. If this was a live environment, then I'd have to worry about keeping the persistent disks and reattaching them.

After XP was successful, I built myself a Win 7 image, created a pool off of it, and awesome! It works great.

I love the dual monitors! I have two different resolution monitors at home, and two different aspect ratio monitors at work, so I can now take full advantage of them with View 4.5.

Now I'm going to proceed with testing out the ThinApp stuff integrated into View 4.5, and some performance testing, but so far it all looks awesome!

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Dustin Shaw
VCP
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Here's some books that should help out: