Installing VMware Horizon Workspace

Last week I spent some time installing Horizon Workspace to create a new demo environment.

Workspace is distributed as a vApp, which you can download here:
http://www.vmware.com/products/desktop_virtualization/horizon-workspace/resources.html

Personally, I quite like the idea of disributing software as a vApp - especially one that pretty much self-configures the way workspace does (more on that later).
However, it can't do all the work for you - there's a few things you need to make sure you have checked or setup before you start:

Check vCenter for previous versions of Horizon Workspace.
I installed v1.5, but I've heard of several people who got tripped up by "stuff" hanging around in vCenter from previous installations.
So, the first thing to do is make sure, if you have a previous version of workspace registered to your vCenter server, shut it down and either remove it from the inventory or delete it from disk.
You should also remove the extension from vCenter, which will involve using the Managed Object Browser (MOB).
There's a good guide to using the MOB here: http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2010/07/how-to-unregister-vcenter.html 

The Horizon Workspace extension isn't easily to identify. Here's what one of mine looked like:

As you can see, there isn't really anything in the properties that says Horizon or Workspace. In fact, even the version number is wrong (this is from a v1.5 install!).

The best way I've found of identifying which extension related to Horizon Workspace is to basically rule out all the others.
Within the vSphere Client, vCenter can give you a more user friendly list of extensions:

Here's what the extension looks like in vCenter

So, from here we can work out that the extension we need to unregister has a version number of 1.0.0. 

Depending on how many extensions you have, it shouldn't be too much trouble to identify which one is Horizon Workspace.

Add an IP Pool & Network Protocol Profile

When you deploy the vApp, it will check to see if you have this configured. 

You can create an IP Pool in vCenter via the vSphere client & associate it with the virtual network that you want to deploy Horizon Workspace to, but it seems that the network protocol profile is something that you can only do in the vSphere Web Client today:

Oh, and remember, if you plan to use fixed IP addresses, DO NOT ENABLE THE IP POOL! Although the vApp checks to see if it's there, if you deploy the vApp using fixed (static) IP addresses and the IP Pool is enabled it actually seems to trip up the configurator-va so leave it disabled:

Assign Static IP Addresses for the vApp

You'll need 5 IP addresses for the vApp, one for each machine:

configurator-va

connector-va

data-va

gateway-va

service-va

I'd recommend keeping a few addresses spare in case you need to deploy additional instances of the data-va (more on this will follow in a future post).

Setup DNS entries & reverse lookups for the vApp VMs

This bit is particularly important. When you fire up the vApp, the configurator-va VM will test DNS to see if this has been configured - if it hasn't, the vApp won't deploy. 

Incidentally, I also found that sluggish performance from my DNS server also tripped me up - I later realised this was down to a network configuration issue - but it's worth bearing in mind that Horizon Workspace is sensitive to the response time it gets from DNS.

SMTP Server

You'll need one of these! Again, this is something the configurator-va will ask for, and if it can't see your SMTP server, the installation won't proceed.

Here's a guide I found useful for setting up an SMTP server on Windows 2008 R2:

http://www.vsysad.com/2012/04/setup-and-configure-smtp-server-on-windows-server-2008-r2/

Here's my SMTP server all setup:

NTP ConfigurationI'm actually not sure if this is essential, but I did notice that the configurator synchronises the time across all the VMs in the vApp, so I thought it would be a good idea if that time was actually correct.

So, in my case I setup my domain controller to act as an NTP server and told all my ESXi hosts to get their time configuration from that.

With all that done, you should be fine to deploy the vApp. Here's what the installation process looked like for me:

First upload the vApp. As you can see, it very helpfully tells you how much disk space you'll need to deploy it!

I'm using fixed or static IP addresses, and yes I did make sure that my IP Pool isn't enabled!

Once you've deployed the vApp, fire up the configurator-va and it will begin prompting you for the information it needs to setup the other VMs in the vApp.

As you can see, the first thing the configurator will do is check if DNS is working properly.

A few steps later, and the configurator has all the info it needs. Now it's going to power on all the other VMs in the vApp and start pushing down their configuration. 

When it's all done, you should see this! Hit enter, and you'll be ready to start configuring Horizon Workspace.

And here's the web portal that we'll use to configure Horizon Workspace  - I'll do another post on that soon!