Yesterday I was busy trying some things in my VMware Horizon View 5.2 environment and after a while I got tired of repeating the same tasks on different desktop pools over and over again. Looking for a way to make things easier I came across the View Pool Manager which is a VMware Fling that allows VMware Horizon View administrators to easily manage multiple desktop pools at the same time.

With this tool VMware solves one of the biggest challenges a VMware View administrators faces in large deployments is desktop pool maintenance. Commonly each desktop pool has an Active Directory security group entitlement with the number of users a given desktop pool will support. As employees leave/join the organization, security groups require maintenance to ensure the number of users in each group correctly match the amount of desktops available. VMware View Pool Manager allows VMware View administrators to easily manage users across desktop pools and security groups for large deployments.

This tool allow administrators to bind an Active Directory connection and specify:

  • How many users there should exist per group (based on VMware View pool size);
  • Floating or Persistent deployment;
  • Source Security Groups (all users to be distributed to pools);
  • Destination Security Groups (All groups the users may be assigned to).

View Pool ManagerThe View Pool Manager requires .NET Framework 4.0. The .NET 3.5 SP1 installation might require Internet connectivity to download more files. Verify that you are a member of the Administrators group on on the domain.

I tried this tool in my test environment and it’s a great help. It really saved me a lot of time in a small environment, so in a large VMware Horizon View deployment this tool should help the View administrators to save hours of work adding, removing and maintaining users, desktop pools and security groups.

The View Pool Manager is a development from Andre Leibovici (myvirtualcloud.net).

I really like it, so when you have a View environment and need a lot of time maintaining it, give it a try!

Download View Pool Manager.