After much
pressure from the MD and Marketing Manager, and now also having my own iPad, I
decided to investigate iPad access to our network.
My first
port of call was configuring a server to run Neocoretech, which is a VDI
solution that does not require a SAN or massively complicated infrastructure prior
installing (unlike some of the alternative solutions). With the Neocoretech server running and
configured on our network, I had to build a Windows 7 image. The image I created was a “read only “image,
so that the user cannot change the image.
Some minor configuration was carried out to make the virtual machine a
member of the domain, as well restricting some functions of the operating
system in order to improve performance.
Testing was
carried out from a laptop to ensure the VDI infrastructure was working, before
connecting my iPad to the wireless network and browsing the VDI landing
page. I had to install a free RDP client
onto my iPad, and I chose Remote Desktop – Universal App by Evolve Networks, as
these gave me the option to create more than one RDP session unlike the Wyse
free application.
On network,
it gave me a very good user experience, where the Windows 7 desktop was useable
on the iPad. The only gripe I had was
that scroll bars were a pain, and where you would expect to press and drag them,
you had to click to jump to the scroll bar on.
My next challenge
was getting this to work remotely. As
you can see from other posts, we use Microsoft UAG hosted on a Celestix
appliance as our remote access, but this solution does not offer an iOS client
to allow the iPad to fully integrate with the features of the UAG, so I am
unable to use the UAG to give me VDI access on the iPad.
As an
alternative, I configured a Cyberoam UTM appliance to give me an L2TP VPN. Following these instructions provided from
Cyberoam will give the right result: http://kb.cyberoam.com/default.asp?id=1891
As did not
have alternative route out to the internet, I create a hotspot on my iPhone,
and used Bluetooth to connect my iPad to the hotspot. Using 3G, I connected my iPad to the L2TP
VPN, and from there started up my RDP client, and connected to my VDI
server. I was surprised as the latency
was not as bad as I had expected, but it gave me my Windows 7 desktop on my
iPad via the 3G network!
Very
impressed how quickly this was configured and running, but now I need to
customise my Windows 7 VDI image to optimise it for our network.