Windows 8 Customer Preview on VMware

A few days ago, Microsoft released Windows 8 Customer Preview. Having a Windows Phone and being a technology advocate and a big fan of the Metro UI, I was really excited to get this in my home lab for testing, which usually means building a virtual machine on vSphere 5 so i can attempt to use it for evaluation purposes.

apparently, being lazy and not having updated vSphere 5 since i installed it meant that the newly released OS would just give me the sad face

windows on vSphere without host patching makes sad.

so i went and installed the required update for Windows 8 to work o my vSphere 5 environment https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/VUM/OFFLINE/release-325-20111212-924952/ESXi500-201112001.zip

fast forward a bit and now i have a windows 8 virtual machine working… so what does someone like me do after its working… well since i enjoy the benefits of VMware View based VDI, its only natural in my mind that I try and make this vm part of my virtual VDI pool. So i did what any curious geek would do. added it to domain, and installed VMware View 5 agent, rebooted the vm and waited eagerly for it to come online so i can try this with my iPad 2 (courtesy of Harvey Nash..thanks guys)… checked on the View console for it… noticed something odd

i see the Windows 8 desktop shown but the agent version is ‘unknown’ and the status message is ‘waiting for agent’ … so i wait and wait and wait… nod off while waiting.. eventually i said.. lets just try it on the view ipad app… as expected i see the message

that’s what i expected since the status on the console says waiting..so i logged into the vm using the vSphere console, works.., i make sure remote desktop is enabled and my local and domain accounts are added to the remote desktop groups, all seems fine. i go back into my windows 7 vDesktop and decide to create a RDP shortcut to connect to the Windows 8 vm and set the display to full screen. i open the Windows 8 session from the windows 7 session from my vmware view ipad endpoint… WORKS…

granted this isnt how i wanted to come in i suppose if i really wanted to test it from ipad and while on the road i would just have to deal..metro UI looks nice, lets go ahead and open (my previously configured mail tile)…

son of a !@#$%, i see the error below

so after all that (which was exciting nonetheless) no reward? that is very frustrating.

Afterthoughts

• would be cool to get a working VMware View Agent that connects to View without issues.
• would also be cool if Microsoft didn’t require higher resolution that my iPad for apps to work… I wonder if the iPad 2 hindrance was deliberate.

i think if the view agent would have worked, i may have replaced my VDI vm of choice in the long run to Windows 8. I know its not retail so it may be a while before the view agent works on W8 but if anyone figures a way to get it working… DO LET ME KNOW

hope that was helpful