VMware Identity Manager Integration with Access Point

VMware Identity Manager also known as vIDM is recently introduced SSO engine which is now used across VMware solutions around EUC and Mobility solutions.
Most of the customers love vIDM is because of its ability to provide single unified interface for accessing your application, which could be apps delivered through Horizon (VDI/Published Apps) or Mobile Apps or SaaS based applications.

vIDM allows us to federate with multiple identity sources at the backend and act as a Single authentication source with SSO capability to be the key to a User Workspace.

vIDM Setup

Its pretty simple and straight forward to deploy vIDM (Workspace) in your LAN setup.
It requires you to deploy the follow the below steps...

1) Deploy vIDM appliance, assign network properties (IP address, netmask, gateway, domain name etc.), create respective DNS records and power it up.

2) Configure it through the UI of the appliance to integrate with the Identity source (like an AD) by providing Base DN, Bind DN and credentials

3) Once we have synced with the AD, map respective backend application sources (e.g. Horizon, Mobile Apps through Airwatch, SaaS apps or Web URLs etc.) to show up as a Catalogue item.

4) Provide Entitlement of these services to the synced users


Access Point Setup

During the deployment of Access Point, i found it to be the most simplest to deploy it using the Powershell scripts.
You can refer to Access Point Deployment Utility (VMware Fling) page for the OVF deployment utility.

The other effective way is to deploy the OVF is using the standard import wizard through the vSphere web client.
I found it convenient to deploy it straight forward by just providing Networking details and leaving the rest sections (i.e. Horizon/Reverse Proxy/Airwatch) blank.

The configuration for integration with vIDM/Horizon/Airwatch can be done later from the Rest API page (https://access-point-appliance.example.com:9443/rest/swagger.yaml)


Refer to the Access Point Installation and Configuration Guide (http://pubs.vmware.com/accesspoint-27/topic/com.vmware.ICbase/PDF/access-point-27-deploy-config-guide.pdf)