Monday, March 2, 2015

Configuring Open Virtual Desktop (OVD) on RedHat/CentOS/Fedora (Part 2)

Hello everyone,

In Part 1 (http://ktaraghi.blogspot.ca/2015/02/installing-open-virtual-desktop-ovd-on.html ), I showed you how to install OVD and add Linux and Windows server to Session Manager and also how to install the Web Portal.
Now, I am going to show you how to configure and launch and publish Windows and Linux
applications. First, we need to create some users.

Click on User tab in Admin console. You have different options here. You can either type them manually and add them to internal database (Figure 1) or ask system to create and populate some random username for you (Figure 2). Also, you can import users from directory service located at Configuration ->Domain integration setting (Figure3, 4):


                                                                           Figure 1

                                                                      Figure 2

                                                                                    Figure 3

                                                                                      Figure 4

Then, you need a user group. On the same User tab, click on User Groups and create a
group. Here I named them All Employee.

                                                                       Figure 5


                                                                                Figure 6

You have a couple of options here that you can assign to groups if you want to, such as
session setting, time restrictions, remote desktop setting and etc…

                                                                                    Figure 7

Now, you need to create a group for applications. Go to Application ->Application Groups. I
create 2 groups for myself. One for Linux apps and one for Windows app.

                                                                                  Figure 8

Then, add desired applications to both application groups:

                                                                                 Figure 9

The same process for Windows group:

                                                                                   Figure 10

                                                                                  Figure 11

And finally, to release applications to users, Go to Application tab and then click on
Publications. Then map the desired groups to desired application groups:

                                                                                       Figure 12

Now, Go to web portal, in this case http://web.ovd.com/ovd/
I am going to show you both Desktop and Portal mode. In Desktop mode, enter your
credentials and click on Connect:

                                                                             Figure 13

As soon as you connect, which is really fast (thanks to HTML5), you will see your desktop and
all your mixed Linux and Windows applications:

                                                                                 Figure 14

                                                                                 Figure 15

In Portal mode, which is a really good mode for smart phones and tablets, you will see all
application icons arranged like tiles beside each others:

                                                                                Figure 16

Other configurations in Admin console are pretty much self explanatory. The last thing that is
good to know is that you are able to see not only active sessions but also to see a history of
all sessions:

                                                                            Figure 17

                                                                            Figure 18

And that’s all. Hope you enjoyed.
Khosro Taraghi

Info and Cited work (for both part1 and part 2 of this article):

Ulteo Open Virtual Desktop v4.0.2 Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.0 support. 2014. 03
March 2015 < http://archive.ulteo.com/ovd/4.0/docs/Support_RHEL_6.0.html > .