VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 2)

January 28, 2013 1 By Eric Shanks

VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 1)

VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 3)

VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 4)

Configure the Horizon Service

Now that the appliances are setup, it’s time to get busy configuring them. Go to the web address of the Horizon service that you configured (from part 1)

In our case this was http://theithollow.hollow.lab

The first page isn’t very interesting, just begin the wizard.

The second page is almost less interesting, because you have to put in your license key that cost you money. It has to be done, so enter it here.

Create the organization. The name is going to match the DNS record we setup earlier for the service appliance. Create a password and choose a logo if you wish.

The next screen requires a token to be generated. There is an option to skip this and do it later, but my strong suggestion is to do this now and copy the token to notepad for use later. I was unable to find where I needed to generate a token when I skipped this step.

Be sure to save this activation token someplace where you can retrieve it. It will be needed to correctly communicate with the connector appliance.

The initial service setup is complete! Well, kind of anyway.

You can now login to the operator dashboard.

The user is operator and the password, you setup in part 1. We’ll be moving on here though so this is a step for part 3.

Configure the Horizon Connector

Let’s login to the Horizon Connector web portal to configure this. http://horizonconnector.hollow.lab in our case.

Set a new password.

Remember that activation code we got from the horizon service setup? Enter that activation code here and click next. Don’t select the use SSL box on this screen. Adding SSL certs is outside the scope of this post.

Now we setup the connection to our Active Directory. Choose the directory type, and either an IP address or the FQDN of a Domain Controller. Depending on your setup you may need to select SSL here, but by default you don’t need it. If you’re unsure, leave it unchecked.

The Search attribute should be sAMAccountName.

The Base DN is where you want to start the directory searches from. In my case I used the top of my domain tree dc=hollow,dc=lab

Next up we need to choose a Bind DN. This is an account that is able to read Active Directory. This does not need to be an administrator account, but it is in my case. You might use a service account to keep password changes from breaking this.

Bind password, is the password for the Bind account.