My previous post covered how to install the VMware App Volumes 4 Manager server. Here we will continue with the initial configuration and setup of App Volumes 4.
App Volumes 4 Configuration
With App Volumes installed you can either click the shortcut for App Volumes Manager (A) on the desktop of the server or connect remotely via a web browser. If connecting remotely use the FQDN for the App Volumes Manager server. You should be presented with a Welcome to App Volumes Manager web page. Click Get Started (B).
On the License Information screen there will be an evaluation license key already applied for 100 users/machines. If you own App Volumes, then click Edit to apply the production license key available to you when you downloaded the installer.
Click Browse and navigate to the VMware_App_Volumes_Production_License_v4.key file previously downloaded and click Open.
With the key selected click Upload.
There should now be a key for 50000 users/machines. To my knowledge VMware does not provide custom key files for App Volumes so you will always show this count when licensed. Since this is almost exclusively used with Horizon the number of users/machines will be limited in Horizon regardless of App Volumes license count. Click Next.
Next the Active Directory Domain information will be entered. The Domain Controller Hosts and LDAP Base fields are optional and allow you to be granular with your deployment, when necessary. For most environment these will be left blank. Utilize a service account with the appropriate read-only access within the domain. Details can be found within the VMware documentation. If your Domain is not set up for Secure LDAP (LDAPS) then you will need to change the dropdown to LDAP (insecure). If you plan to enable Secure LDAP be sure to come back and edit this option so that App Volumes will continue to function after the change. Click Register once complete.
Once registered there should be a message displaying that the domain was successfully registered, and the new domain entry should be listed. Click Next.
On the Administrator Roles screen add the appropriate group that contains the users who should receive Administrative privileges to App Volumes Manager. This entitles those users wo login to the Administrator portal and manage all aspects of the App Volumes environment.
Enter the group name into the Search Groups field and hit Search (A).A dropdown will display the related groups and be sure to select the correct one (B) before clicking Assign (C).
The assigned group should now be listed. If you need to add additional groups, you can. Then click Next.
On the Machine Managers page the vCenter for where the App Stacks will be placed and mounted to virtual desktops needs to be registered. There are other options for direct to ESXi or VHD, but for now the focus is on Horizon integration so we will use the vCenter server.
Enter the vCenter server FQDN, followed by a vCenter account and password. Next it may be more efficient to leverage ESXi to perform the disk mount operations as opposed to using vCenter. In large environments this can free up the number of commands issues by vCenter and allow App Volumes to communicate directly to each host for the disk mounts. In the screenshot below this was not chosen but is recommended. Take a look at the other options and their descriptions to determine if your environment would benefit from any of them. The below screen shot shows a common configuration, with the exception of Mount ESXi.
Be sure to place the username in Domain\Username format.
Click Save.
A security warning displaying the untrusted certificate of the vCenter will need to be accepted before continuing. Click Accept.
The vCenter should now be listed under Machine Manager. Click Next.
On the Storage page a datastore needs to be selected for the default packages and writable volumes to be copied to. Depending on the size environment dedicated datastores should be created to the app stacks to be located. After completing the initial configuration, a Storage Group can be created to replicate app stacks across datastores.
Select your datastores in each of the dropdowns and click Next.
Now that the storage location has been configured the Templates need to be uploaded. Select a datastore, in most cases it will be the same one selected in the previous step. If you previously set up vCenter you can select the Use vCenter option which will use the credentials you entered for the Machine Manager to access the datastore via vCenter and upload each template.
At the bottom select the templates that you plan to use. If you are unsure, then simply import all of them so that you have them ready in case you need to use them. They are just over 200MB in size.
Click Upload.
Click Upload again on the Confirm Upload Templates window.
The last step is the App Volumes Manager Settings. In most cases these can be left at their default setting but be sure to read them to determine if any should be adjusted for your use case.
At this point App Volumes 4 is installed and ready for you to start creating App Stacks.
I hope you found this helpful. Thank you for reading.