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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.

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

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William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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