Unidesk with Hyper-V Setup Part 1

I am not attempting to write a comprehensive setup guide for Unidesk here. It will be a pretty detailed setup for the most part but will not include setting up the pre-requisites. The guys over at Unidesk already have free to view, very comprehensive documentation and how to videos over on their website. This post is based on Unidesk 3.0 and really, serves as my own brain dump that I’ve decided to share 🙂

With that said the pre-requisites are as follows:

Pre-requisites

Hyper-V setup and configured

RDS setup and configured (Including IIS and .Net Framework amongst other roles\features to support the setup)

Silverlight

The pre-requisites are quite simple to setup and configure. On Server 2012 you can just add the relevant roles as above. In my particular setup, I set Hyper-V and all RDS components up on one server.

You should also plan for ample storage based on the number of users and desktops you plan to support. This obviously will be a different equation for each company. You can also plan on whether or not you’d like your Virtual Desktops to be persistent or non-persistent. I’ve stated before that I thought that Unidesk was one of the easiest routes for deploying Non-persistent Virtual Desktops. I’ll cover this in more depth in a future blog post. I think Unidesk is also an awesome solution for the data center. RDS by itself is a real cluster to maintain and support when you’ve got 100 plus desktops deployed, Unidesk helps with this. If you are deploying across a spread out geographical region, you should also plan for this. For more info about planning your networking and storage requirements, you can contact Unidesk support, they can provide you with a pretty nifty excel spreadsheet to calculate what you should need.

Install Unidesk

Launch UnideskInstaller.exe on your Hyper-V Host Server. You should find this executable in unidesk_hyperv_installer_3.0.0.zip file

Click ‘ I agree to these Terms and Conditions’ and Click Accept

Click Install

Click Next >

Assign a Hyper-V Agent port, I just stuck with the default. (Unidesk also creates it’s own Windows Firewall rules) and then Click Next>

Click Install

Click Finish

The Install Management Appliance dialog should now appear. The MA is a VM with a Linux Shell, it will be used for storing info about the layers you create and acting as a go between for the cachepoint that we will also be setting up.

Provide a name for the MA

Provide a location to store this VM

Point to a Virtual Switch

You can select between a Dynamic IP or Static. Static is certainly best for an Enterprise environment and then click Install

As you can see, you are now prompted to deploy the Master Cachepoint Appliance. Which you can do from the Management Console. Click on the HyperLink for the Console.