VDI Best Practices

• Forwarding
• Development Environment
  • Installing Git Command Line
  • Installing and Configuring VSCode
  • SSH Client (Optional)
• References

Managing your own company emails, meetings, applications and then additionally those within the VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) session for the customer you are working with can be a struggle.

Below are some tips and tricks while using a VDI session.

Forwarding

Configure forwarding of meetings and even emails to your main/preferred email address and calendar system. This ensures one central view and makes life simpler. Note that some companies frown on this as it’s a security issue to forward content to an external system.

• Open Outlook
• Navigate to File -> Manage Rules & Alerts menu
• Select New Rule ...
• Select Apply rule on messages | receive and click NEXT
• Select which is a meeting invitation or update and click NEXT
• Select Yes to confirm
• Select forward it to "people or public group", and then click the hyperlink people or public group in the box below and add provide target email address in the TO field and click OK
• Click NEXT
• Click NEXT
• Specify the rule name, for example “Forward to Red Hat”
• Click FINISH

Development Environment

If you intend to do some development work within a VDI session, you’ll most likely need to setup SSH, code editor, and ultimately be able to clone a repository from a version control system to begin your work. Most of these instructions can be completed even if you do not have administrator access within your VDI environment. Simply install apps into a shared folder. Some folders will be emptied upon restart of your VDI session so be sure you find the right folder to use.

Installing Git Command Line

Windows users need access to a bash terminal. bash is a command-line interpreter that interprets and runs your commands written in the bash command language. Windows does not have this by default, so we will install Git Bash which is a bash command line with git installed on it. This allows you to use the commands that we run in this class and be able to run git commands to turn in assignments.

Steps:

1. Go to Git For Windows and click Download.
2. After downloading and running the installation, hit Yes to allow for changes.
3. Go through the prompts hitting next each time with the default options.

Installing and Configuring VSCode

Visual Studio Code (VSCode) is the highly recommended code editor. It is a feature-rich text editor that has a wide array of configurations and community-made extensions.

Steps:

1. Download and install VSCode.
2. Inside VSCode, open up the terminal by going to the menu option Terminal > New Terminal
3. Switch the default terminal profile to Git Bash. If it’s not listed, restart VSCode and try again - sometimes it doesn’t list until restarted but it should be listed to select as the default terminal shell.
4. Exit current terminal window and start a new one which should now be using Git Bash.
5. Install recommended VSCode extensions
   • Ansible
   • Jinja
   • Remote Development
   • TODO Highlight

6. Inside of the VSCode Git Bash terminal, enter these commands and substituting your username and email, with the quotes included:

    # Configure git
    git config --global http.sslVerify false
    git config --global user.name "First Lastname"
    git config --global user.email "email@example.com"
   
    # General ssh keys using RSA algorithm with default values
    ssh-keygen -t rsa
    # Copy public key to clipboard and add this to BitBucket, GitHub, or GitLab account
    cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | clip
    # Confirm ssh authentication works
    ssh -T git@<gitserver-url>
    # Create working folder that holds cloned repositories
    cd; mkdir repositories
    cd repositories
    # Clone repository locally
    git clone <repo>
   

SSH Client (Optional)

For SSH’ing to bastion hosts within terminal windows, I’d advise using a Git Bash window that is now available after installing Git for Windows. However, an alternative multi-window SSH client is MobaXTerm. Consider installing the Portable Edition which has the software inside a single folder and does not require administrator access to the machine.

References

• Git and VSCode Setup - Windows
• TODO: Add Docker for Windows so that the Ansible extension can run ansible-lint inside container
• TODO: Add using Windows WSL v2 and setup virtual environments