Table of Contents
ThinLinc VDI communicates with an existing VMware Virtual Infrastructure (VI). The supported environment is VMware vSphere (VI 4.0). ThinLinc must be registered against a single instance of vCenter Server which manages the ESX hosts; ThinLinc does not support authenticating directly with ESX servers.
The vCenter server used with ThinLinc must have a user available for ThinLinc to register as. This can be any user, however it is recommended to create a dedicated user for ThinLinc to use. This user must have the correct permissions in order to be able to perform the required tasks - see Section 21.1.2, “ Creating a user ” for more details.
ThinLinc supports automatic customization of cloned machines by using VMware's Customization Configurations. In order for this to work for Microsoft Windows clones you will need to have sysprep installed on the vCenter machine, and a customization configuration created prior to cloning the machine from the administration interface. See Section 21.1.4, “ Using customization configurations ” for more information on how to set this up.
This section describes the requirements of templates in VMware vCenter for use with ThinLinc VDI.
'Template' in the context of ThinLinc VDI refers to a virtual machine image from which all machines for a particular pool are cloned. This differs from VMware parlance, in which a template is any virtual machine marked as a 'template' and does not represent a compute resource (i.e. is not assigned to any particular host, cluster or resource pool). 'Template' in the following section refers to the ThinLinc VDI concept of a template unless otherwise indicated.
The templates used within the VDI environment must have VMware Tools installed on them before use with ThinLinc VDI. For more information about creating templates for use with ThinLinc, see Section 21.1.3, “ Creating a template ”. In order to clone from snapshots or create linked clones, the template must have at least one snapshot available, and reside on an ESX host which supports these operations.