MonthAug 2019

RDS for Horizon Eventlog Database on VMware Cloud on AWS

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while automating time-consuming administration tasks such as hardware provisioning, database setup, patching and backups. It frees you to focus on your applications so you can give them the fast performance, high availability, security and compatibility they need.

Horizon needs a Database for the eventlogs. We will use RDS to create a database for our event db in Horizon.

Deploy RDS on AWS is super easy. Just Click on the RDS service in AWS , select the DB type you need – in our case we will use MS SQL – For our Demo we will use the free tier but of course it is just for demo purpose. Once the DB instance is up and running you have to find the Endpoint URL and make sure the right port is set and it should be not public accessible since we will use the ENI connection to access the DB.

We can now proceed and try to access this new instance via a VM with SQL management tools installed on it in VMC on AWS. We will also use the management tools to create a a specific database for the eventlogs.

We are connected to the DB instance and can create a specific DB for the eventlog database.

Now we can start to configure Horizon Connection Server with the eventlog Configuration

Prerequisites for Configuring Event DB

You need the following information to configure an event database:

• The DNS name or IP address of the database server.
• The type of database server: Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle.
• The port number that is used to access the database server. The default is 1521 for Oracle and 1433 for SQL Server. For SQL Server, if the database server is a named instance or if you use SQL Server Express, you might need to determine the port number. See the Microsoft KB article about connecting to a named instance of SQL Server, at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/265808.
• The name of the event database that you created on the database server. See Add a Database and Database User for View Events.For an Oracle 12c or 11g database, you must use the Oracle System Identifier (SID) as the database name when you configure the event database in View Administrator.
• The username and password of the user you created for this database. See Add a Database and Database User for View Events.Use SQL Server Authentication for this user. Do not use the Integrated Windows Authentication security model method of authentication.
• A prefix for the tables in the event database, for example, VE_. The prefix enables the database to be shared among View installations.
  

That is only one example how to use RDS service with our EUC solutions. In further blog posts i will bring more examples specially for POC’s. Also my next blog post will bring light into how to use FSx for profile data and other file services.

Route 53 for VMware Horizon on VMware Cloud on AWS

Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable cloud Domain Name System (DNS) web service. It is designed to give developers and businesses an extremely reliable and cost-effective way to route end users to Internet applications by translating names like http://www.example.com into the numeric IP addresses like 192.0.2.1 that computers use to connect to each other.

We will use Route 53 to create a DNS record that will point us to a public IP address we are requesting via VMware Cloud on AWS and pointing to our UAG.

Leveraging AWS AD service with VMware Horizon on VMware Cloud on AWS

VMC on AWS is a great solution to use AWS native service and implement those native services into existing services. In this blog post series, I will explain how we can leverage Active Directory, RDS, FSx and other AWS native service with our EUC solutions. This will only show you how easy it is to implement AWS native service into existing services and is using ONLY for Demo purpose for this blog post.

Before we can start we need to make sure that we have set the right firewall rules on the VMC site but also in the AWS security group. We created a AWS out and AWS in policy on VMC and configured the security group on AWS site. Please make sure this connection is working before proceeding with the AWS native deployment. We will roll out an AWS managed Active Directory. This Active Directory will be used for our whole Horizon deployment on VMware Cloud on AWS. All Horizon Components are living in VMware Cloud on AWS but will attach AWS native services via the ENI for EventDatabases, Active Directory and other services. Let’s roll out our first AWS managed Active Directory. Go to your AWS account and click on Directory Services