WilliamLam.com

  • About
    • About
    • Privacy
  • VMware Cloud
  • Tanzu
    • Application Modernization
    • Tanzu services
    • Tanzu Community Edition
    • Tanzu Kubernetes Grid
    • vSphere with Tanzu
  • Home Lab
  • Nested Virtualization
  • Apple
You are here: Home / Horizon View / Installing the Horizon View Agent on a Domain Controller

Installing the Horizon View Agent on a Domain Controller

03.09.2017 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

A couple of weeks back, a fellow colleague needed to install the Horizon View Agent on a Microsoft Windows Domain Controller to be able to take advantage of the Direct Connect feature to efficiently connect into a lab environment. In general, this is not a recommended practice. In fact, by default the Horizon View Agent includes several pre-checks, one of which that prevents the installation if it detects the underlining system is a Domain Controller.

In this particular scenario, the Domain Controller was not being used for a real production environment but rather as part of a vPod that is hosted in a Hands-On-Lab type of environment. I could also see another use case where this might occur in personal home labs where you might consolidate several types of roles on a single Windows system and wish to be able to use the Direct Connect feature of the Horizon View Client.

The individual had searched extensively online but all the suggested command-line flags were not applicable to the Horizon View Agent. After pinging me for ideas, I reached out to a few of our End-User Computing folks and thanks to them, we found a neat little work around by tweaking the MSI installer.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware, please use at your own risk. There are no guarantees that the behavior described here will continue to function going forward and it can change without notice.

Step 1 - Download and install the Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows 7.

Step 2 - Install the orca.exe (Windows database editor tool) which is bundled within the Windows SDK and can be found under C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0\Bin

Step 3 - Download the version of the Horizon View Agent that you need from the VMware website.

Step 4 - Extract the contents of the Horizon View Agent by opening a command prompt and running the following command:

VMware-viewagent-x86_64-7.0.3-4717913.exe /x

To locate the extracted content, you will need to go to %LOCALAPPDATA%\temp and then find a directory that looks something like {UUID}~setup as shown in the screenshot below. Within that directory, you should see various vcredist files and the Horizon View Agent MSI.


Step 5 - Install the applicable vcredist file for your platform which may include other Windows update MSU files before proceeding to the next step.

Step 6 - Open the VMware Horizon Agent MSI using Orca and then locate the LaunchCondition tables on the left hand side of the application. From there, locate the "Installed Or Not (MsiNTPProductType=2) condition on the right and then delete that row. Save the changes and you are now done editing the MSI


Step 7 - Lastly, to install the modified Horizon View Agent, launch the MSI using the following command:

msiexec /i [HORIZON-VIEW-AGENT-MSI] [OTHER-CLI-OPTIONS] /l*v install.log

So, there you have it, Horizon View Agent running on a Domain Controller!

More from my site

  • Tech Preview of Horizon Provider for VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA)
  • Listing all VMware Horizon Events
  • How to bootstrap Horizon View 5.3.1 onto a VSAN Datastore using VCT
  • Automating Horizon View deployments using VCT & cURL
  • Horizon View in a box using new Horizon View Config Tool

Categories // Horizon View, Not Supported Tags // domain controller, horizon view, Horizon View Agent

Thanks for the comment! Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Search

Author

William Lam is a Senior Staff Solution Architect working in the VMware Cloud team within the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group (CIBG) at VMware. He focuses on Cloud Native technologies, Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud based Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC)

Connect

  • Email
  • GitHub
  • LinkedIn
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • Vimeo

Recent

  • Changing the default HTTP(s) Reverse Proxy Ports on ESXi 8.0 03/22/2023
  • Quick Tip - How to download ESXi ISO image for all releases including patch updates? 03/15/2023
  • SSD with multiple NVMe namespaces for VMware Homelab 03/14/2023
  • Is my vSphere Cluster managed by vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) as a Desired Image or Baseline? 03/10/2023
  • Interesting VMware Homelab Kits for 2023 03/08/2023

Advertisment

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy

Copyright WilliamLam.com © 2023

 

Loading Comments...