TestDrive

Dynamic Environment Manager Walkthrough

Updated on

In this quick walkthrough we're going to demo VMware Dynamic Environment Manager. 

Overview

  • Connect to Workspace One Access
  • Launch the TD-RDS-Desktops
  • Launch the Dynamic Environment Manager Console to show a managed application configuration for "Paint.net"
  • Show the application specific network drive and printer mappings associated with "Paint.net"
  • From the RDS Desktop launch the Paint.net application and demonstrate the drive and printer mappings in effect, then change some app settings before closing the app
  • Launch the "Paint.net" Horizon published application from Workspace ONE and show the application specific settings we changed have been saved and persist across sessions

Before You Begin

In order to perform the full end-to-end demo make sure you have the following:

  • A valid account in the VMware TestDrive environment, sign up here if you don't
  • Network access from your device and TCP ports 80, 443 and 4172 & UDP 4172 enabled
  • An appropriate Horizon client installed on your device
  • An appropriate web browser (such as Google Chrome) installed on your device

Let's get started, open up your favorite web browser and get signed into Workspace ONE

http://testdrive.vidmpreview.com
Click to copy

Once you're logged in and at the Workspace ONE home screen, we need to add the RDSH Desktop and the "Paint.net" application to our bookmarks (If you've already got these, skip ahead to where we first launch the RDS Desktop session from Workspace ONE).

Click on "Catalog" at the top and select your home region from the left, then scroll down until you see the RDSH Desktop for your region, hit the bookmark icon in the bottom right of the tile.Search again for "Paint" and you should see the "Paint.net" published application icon, add that one too

You should now see the new icons in your Bookmarks

Now let's go ahead and launch the RDS Desktop session, once you get logged in launch the DEM console by double-clicking the "VMware Dynamic Environment Manager Console" icon

Once the console has launched, click "Applications" then in the "Paint.net" application check out the configuration tabs, make sure to check the "User Environment" section which shows that we have a network drive and printer mapping in the DEM app config

Close down the Dynamic Environment Manager console, before we launch the app let's fire up a Windows Explorer window and our printers control panel so we can see the drive and printer mappings appear when we launch the "Paint.net" app.  We want to specifically call out the "Network Locations" and "Printers" areas, as these will change once we launch the app

Use the desktop shortcut (or hit the start button and search for the "Paint.net" app) to launch the app. Once the app is launched, hit the "Minimize" button so we can look at the drive mappings and printers

Here we can see our drive and printer mapping configurations have come through as expected

So let's switch back to the "Paint.net" app and make some changes to the window and tool palette layouts, a quick way of doing this is by toggling the palette buttons in the top-right hand corner of the app window

Turn some of the toolbox items on or off as desired

Now close the "Paint.net" application BUT leave your RDS Desktop session running, we'll be coming back to that in a minute

So let's go back to our Workspace ONE bookmarks and now we can launch the "Paint.net" published application. Click Allow if you get prompted for to launch that app Paint.NET.

Once the application launches you'll notice that you now get the same window layout you configured in the RDS desktop session, that's because DEM has saved and persisted your app configuration settings

Now let's make some more changes to the application, like adding some tools back into our layout and draw something on canvas. Then save it.

Click Save button. You will get prompted to save to a default location called UEM-REDIRECT. You can either save in this location or save to This PC-->Picture folder that is your profile location as well and Dynamic Environment Manager will save and persist your all configuration.

Either Save into This PC-->Picture folder or 

Save into default UEM-REDIRECT location

And next screen will pop up and hit OK.

Close out of the published application and go back to your (hopefully!) still running RDSH Desktop session, and launch "Paint.net" one last time and then click File-->Open

Open your saved file. For instance here Shamima-Test file is opened.  As you can see that all your changes have persisted from the published app session, and DEM is managing the per user application configuration settings.

That is the last step in this super simple DEM demo! That's a logical place to stop, let's have a quick recap of what happened!

Walkthrough Summary

  • We added the Horizon RDS Desktop and "Paint.net" published application to our Workspace ONE bookmarks
  • We made a connection to the RDS Desktop and launch the DEM Console to show a managed application configuration for "Paint.net"
  • We noted the application specific network drive and printer mappings associated with "Paint.net"
  • From the RDS Desktop we launched the Paint.net application and demonstrated the drive and printer mappings in effect, then changed some app settings before closing the app
  • We then launched the "Paint.net" Horizon published application from Workspace ONE and showed the application specific settings we changed had been saved and persisted across sessions
Previous Article VMware App Volumes - Published Apps On Demand