Horizon cloud on Azure – Desktop provisioning

Eknath -
Reading Time: 7 mins

If you have already gone through my earlier post on pod creation and your pod is healthy with no errors, then you can go through next steps for image creation and desktop provisioning..

Login to horizon cloud console using the url given here:

Since the domain registration is completed, you will have to type in the domain credentials to login to the portal.

After successful login, home page displays as shown below with options on the left Monitor, Assignments, Inventory and Settings. 

To start with, there should be an image available to provision the desktops or the applications. Since I don’t have any, will download the same from market place and yes, you can certainly upload your own if you have image installed with correct agents installed.

Navigate to Inventory > Imported vm’s > Import – This allows you to Add your own vm or download from azure market place. In this post, I am going to download from market place.

Click on Select below “From Marketplace”

 

While downloading, it will ask you for few details like given below.. fill them carefully and select the desktop that suits your requirement.

  • Location
  • Pod
  • OS
  • Include GPU
  • Domain etc.,

Carefully type in the details and also you have option to select some advanced features as shown below while downloading from market place:

Once the import button is selected, you can see the vm getting created in azure portal like shown below.. this may take a total of 10-15 mins for it to download, deploy, domain join , Agent install, boot strapping, agent pairing. wait for the Agent status turns Active with a version.

As soon as the vm is showing as Active under imported vm’s, then proceed with conversion of vm to an image, this can be done in admin portal:

Login to Admin portal > Inventory > Images > New

Fill in all the required like the way shown below and click on publish

This image conversion process would take few minutes to complete: Status change from In Transition to Published. Entire process can be seen under Monitor > Activity tab

Once the vm is converted to image successfully, next step is to create Assignments

Login to Adminportal > Assignments > New.. Here, you have the ability to create a pool for desktops or Applications or custom. In this post, let’s continue with Desktops .

Type of Assignments:

Dedicated –

Floating –

Session –

After deciding on type of desktops to be used, you will be asked to fill few details .. I would like to highlight about the desktop models that are available while creating assignments in Horizon cloud on Azure and below are the one I was referring to.. You can select appropriate desktop model based on your user requirements and note that each model has a different price.. For more details about cost, refer here

 

  • Standard_A1_v2 : 1 CPU, 2 GB Memory
  • Standard_A2_v2 : 2 CPUs, 4 GB Memory
  • Standard_A4_v2 : 4 CPUs, 8 GB Memory
  • Standard_A8_v2 : 8 CPUs, 16 GB Memory
  • Standard_D2_v3 : 2 CPUs, 8 GB Memory
  • Standard_D4_v3 : 4 CPUs, 16 GB Memory
  • Standard_D8_v3 : 8 CPUs, 32 GB Memory
  • Standard_E2_v3 : 2 CPUs, 16 GB Memory
  • Standard_E4_v3 : 4 CPUs, 32 GB Memory
  • Standard_E8_v3 : 8 CPUs, 64 GB Memory
  • Standard_F1 : 1 CPUs, 2 GB Memory
  • Standard_F2 : 2 CPUs, 4 GB Memory
  • Standard_F4 : 4 CPUs, 8 GB Memory
  • Standard_F8 : 8 CPUs, 16 GB Memory
  • Standard_NV6: 6 CPUs, 56 GB Memory

 

Assign permissions to the assignment: you can either assign permission to an user or a group.

Review the summary and submit:

In Azure portal, you can track the progress of vm creation and once they are fully created, vm status turn into running state. Admin portal activity page shows the progress to and you are good to access the desktops / applications if the completion turns 100 %.

Each desktop goes through following phases and can be observed under Activity page of Admin portal:

  • Request to clone virtual machine ‘<desktop name>’ – Initiated
  • Locating resources
  • Creating network interfaces while cloning VM
  • Cloning from snapshot
  • Finished virtual machine ‘<desktop name>’ customization. Request to join the domain – Initiated
  • Request to clone virtual machine ‘<desktop name>’ and domain join – Successful

 

Collect the public ip address from the azure portal: login to Azure portal > select UAG > public IP address

(or)

Connect to Admin portal > Capacity > pod > Gateway Settings > External UAG > Load Balancer FQDN

Here, in this post I have used public ip to access the portal:

      

 

Just a click on the captain pool, brings you the desktop as shown below.. That’s it, you can access it and start working on it.

 

You can connect to the desktop’s in many ways i.e.,

  • Through Internet which requires public ip or FQDN load balancer or the domain name ( if the public ip is added to the DNS) – Traffic here goes through external UAG’s.
  • Internally to tenant IP address : Admin portal > settings > capacity > pod > properties > Tenant Appliance IP address – You can connect here directly to node manager
  • Internally to Internal load balancer FQDN: Admin portal > settings > capacity > pod > Gateway settings > Internal UAG > Load Balancer FQDN – Traffic here goes through internal UAG’s.

 

Publishing floating pools , applications (using RDSH server) is almost similar like above steps .. Anyhow, will give detailed steps in my next posts.. stay tuned.

Thanks for reading .. BTW, welcome to “Horizon Cloud on Azure”