There are a few ways to preload the Omnissa Horizon client (formerly the VMware Horizon client) with a default Horizon Connection Server.
One method is to deploy the Horizon prefs.txt
file with the Horizon connection server. For more information about the prefs.txt
file method, my blog post, Omnissa Horizon Client prefs.txt, goes into detail.
Another method is the VDM_SERVER
property. When you install the Horizon client, you can define the VDM_SERVER
property. Omnissa does have some documentation about the VDM_Server
property. However, it only says that you can use it to set a default horizon connection server for the users. It doesn’t go into detail on how it works. If you run the help command on the Horizon client installer, it doesn’t go into much more detail either.
Given that there isn’t a lot of info about the VDM_Server
property, I needed to know more, and down the rabbit hole I went.
How does the VDM_Server
property work, and is it better than using the prefs.txt
file to preload the Horizon connection server? If the VDM_Server
property works better, it could simplify how I’ve been deploying the Horizon client. I also needed to know if it works only for the user that installed the Horizon client or all users. I wanted to see if it did the same thing I did manually with the prefs.txt
file.
If you install the Horizon client using the logging command /l
or /log
, everything the Horizon client install does is logged to a log file.
With logging enabled, I ran the Horizon client install with a value for the VDM_SERVER
property. The command I ran was
.\Omnissa-Horizon-Client.exe VDM_SERVER="Horizon.1company.com;Horizon.2company.com" /l C:\temp\HorizonInstall.log
Code language: PowerShell (powershell)
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