Horizon View local mode - Lessons learned

Recently I have deployed VMware Horizon View 5.2 for one of my customers and “VMware Horizon View 5.2 local mode” is part of the solution.

It’s straight forward installation and configuration as per VMware documentation but I had to troubleshoot check-in, check-out and power on issues.

I can’t recollect exact error messages but similar to “Unable to check out local mode desktops in VMware View Manager” or “ Connect desktop Failed” or it fails during check Out or fails to power on after successful check out on to the client machine.

Issues resolved for me after checking/ fixing following things.

1.       Make sure that Client machine (Windows XP/7 Machine on which you are checking out) CPU is Virtual Technology capable and VT is enabled in BIOS. Steps to check VT status using Microsoft “havdetectiontool” here

If VT is not enabled in BIOS, you get error message as follows

The virtual machine is configured for 64-bit guest operating systems. However, 64 bit operation is not possible

2.       Make sure that Horizon client machine has enough free disk space available to store local mode desktop image. Free Space on client machine should be equal to Virtual desktop image size, in other words, if virtual desktop image size is 15 GB, it’s recommended to have 15 GB free space available plus amount of RAM allocated. 

3.       Make sure that “VMware Authorization Service “is running. I had a strange issue, start and stop options were greyed out when I right click service to start, and then stated service with “net start” command.

 

4.       Make sure that the client machine has enough hardware resources available. It should have the hardware to run the local operating system and virtual desktop. If virtual desktop allocated memory is 2 GB, I recommend having 3 GB plus physical memory on the client machine.

( If you have already deployed View and want to know if it's satisfying all VMware best practices, you can run the VMware View Health Check tool and get the report. It's really handy for consultants.

Update- 10/11/2014: Horizon View Local mode feature has been discontinued from VMware Horizon 6.0. I see VMware is going in a path to provide more efficient local mode feature using VMware Fusion, VMware Player, VMware Mirage, VMware Horizon FLEX technologies.

New customers interested in offline virtual desktops should purchase Horizon Mirage (which includes VMware Fusion Professional and VMware Player Plus) or one of the suites that include both the Mirage product and Fusion Professional.

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