VMware and CDP

The Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) is a Cisco proprietary protocol to share information between directly connected network devices. It’s very useful, especially in a complex network, to discover its topology, for example which switch port a server is connected to. In addition to CDP and other proprietary protocols, a IEEE standard protocol exists, the Link Layer Discovery Protocol…

How to publish a Thinapp to a group of users

Sometimes you may need to publish a Thinapped application to a specific group of users. If you use Thinapp with VMWare View, from the latter’s GUI you can assign your Thinapp to a pool or a desktop, not to users or groups: You can allow a specific user or group to run your Thinapp modifying the Package.ini file within the folder that contains your project: Type…

VMWare View, how to count active sessions

Today I needed to track the number of active sessions of a given virtual desktop pool in my VMWare View infrastructure. VMWare offers some cmdlets to Powershell integration; you can find them on the server where the Connection Server is installed: You can include those cmdlets in your scripts with the command: add-PSSnapin "VMware.View.Broker"add-PSSnapin "VMware.View.Broker" To get remote sessions, use Get-RemoteSession cmdlet,…

VMWare, Linux text terminals

In every Linux distro, if you’re using the grapical interface and you need to switch to text terminal, you have to press  CTRL+ALT+Fx  x usually from 1 to 6); while to switch back to the GUI the shortcut sequence is CTRL+ALT+F7. If you installed Linux in a virtual machine with VMWare as hypervisor, you probably noticed that the shortcut…