Horizon View Configuration Tool

The Horizon View Configuration Tool automates Horizon View 5.2 installation and deployment. It removes the complexities and manual steps required for setting up a basic Horizon View deployment.

The vCT ships as a virtual appliance with all the required VMware components to set up your Horizon View environment. You provide the Windows Server 2008 R2 ISO, an ESX host, a few parameters, and your licenses, and then the tool will provision your environment dynamically and automatically.

Using the vCT web UI, you will be guided through required fields to customize your deployment.

Figure 1: vCT UI Home Page

Figure 2: vCT Deployment Screen

Figure 3: vCT Deployment Screen – Configuring vCenter Server Appliance

The vCT deploys the following components:

• Virtual machine with Active Directory Domain Controller configured (or you may integrate with the existing DC in your environment)
• Virtual machine with Horizon View installed
• Virtual machine with Horizon View Composer installed
• vCenter Server Appliance virtual machine deployed and configured

For each of these Windows-based components, the tool dynamically deploys a virtual machine, installs Windows Server 2008 R2, and then installs and configures the Horizon View components.

Once the deployment is complete, you will be able to navigate directly to your Horizon View administrative console, and your environment will be ready for VDI.

The vCT was originally created to support the VMware Rapid Desktop Program, now part of the vFast Track Program.

The vCT 1.0 is available to all VMware Desktop Competency Partners and members of the vFast Track or the Rapid Desktop Program. To learn more about vCT, send in feature requests, or to find out how you can take advantage of using this tool, contact:vctsupport@vmware.com.

Unable to increase the number of ports on a virtual switch in ESXi 5.5

By design, the number of ports on a standard virtual switch in  ESXi 5.5 cannot be modified. To ensure efficient use of resources on hosts running ESXi 5.5, the ports of virtual switches are dynamically scaled up and down. A switch on such a host can expand up to the maximum number of ports supported on the host. The port limit is determined based on the maximum number of virtual machines that the host can handle. It uses only the elastic option and the ports are dynamically increased or reduced according to need. By functionality, it is similar to the auto-expand feature available in dvSwitch starting with vSphere 5.0.

However, the vSphere Client still shows 120 ports by default and allows you to modify, though the default is set to 1536 at the back-end and does not change.

The vSphere Web Client correctly shows the updated value for the number of ports as elastic.

Running the esxcli network vswitch standard list command from the shell prompt shows Num Ports as 1536.