Next, we declared our server to the VDS console. This involves providing the IP addresses of the agent appliance and ESX Server system along with administrative credentials for the latter. The agent appliance provides tight integration between the VDS console and ESX Server as we could use the Virtual Guest list option to display all available VMs.
Usefully, this shows them whether they are powered up or not and at the bottom of this screen you have controls for remotely powering selected systems up and down, resetting them or suspending them , thereby avoiding the need to use the VMware Infrastructure Client for these basic operations.
VDS makes light work of the publishing process as the console has buttons across the top for creating links to applications, folders, desktops, documents, virtual desktops and PC desktops. We had VMs with Windows Vista loaded and were able to publish them to our users with nothing more than few mouse clicks. Not that it's a big issue, but we noted that our VMs with Server 2008 loaded were not showing up and 2X advised us that these are not currently supported.
VDS has a new publishing wizard that makes the process even easier. Using this we were able to swiftly publish all our main MS Office 2007 applications along with folders and virtual desktops on our Terminal Server systems.
Tight security is provided as each user must authenticate with the VDS server to retrieve lists of published resources. You can apply workgroup or Active Directory authentication and 2X also has integrated support for DeepNet two-factor authentication servers.
