Posted by Brian on Feb 24, 2010 in Citrix, XenDesktop | View Comments
I found a new white paper released from Citrix today that talks about steps you can take to really optimize your XP images. Sure everyone thinks about things like turning off a few unused services, screen savers and power saving features. But this paper takes a deep dive into a list of settings that you can manually change and explains others that are available in the XenConvert optimizer tool from Citrix. Head on over to Citrix and grab the doc here.
- Offers a better alternative than replacing the default user profile (which isn’t supported and doesn’t help for users that already have profiles)
- Makes a distinction between private mode (1:1) and standard mode (1:many) desktops
- Provides the actual registry keys/values for all optimizations (to ensure that all settings can be set by Group Policy or login scripts)
- Gives best practices for optimizing the user profiles (like installing UPHclean)
- Excludes configurations and steps that don’t help (like defragmenting a disk before performing a volume copy)
- Details what registry changes are included in the XenConvert Optimizer tool (so you know what all those checkboxes are doing)
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Posted by Brian on Feb 24, 2010 in Featured, VMware | View Comments
I was surprised to see this today that general support for ESX 3.5 will end in late May. What this means is ESX 3.5 asnd ESXi 3.5 will be moved into extended support mode. I have explained the different support modes below. This should spur some people into getting those planned upgrades moving forward. This will also affect Virtual Center 2.5 so you should take a serious look at this and see if you have any risk. Get the full story directly from VMware here.
Here are the differences in the support modes.
General support mode: This means that the product is actively being tested and certified with new hardware from vendors and that it will support new Operating systems.
Extended support mode: This is kind of a keep the lights on mode. VMware will not be actively testing and certifying any new hardware for these releases. There will not be any new Operating Systems added to the compatibility unless there is great enough customer demand. And lastly they will only be issuing security patches and critical bug fixes. There will be no other development done.
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Posted by Brian on Feb 23, 2010 in Lab Manager, VMware | View Comments
I had never really had much time to delve into Lab Manager that deeply in the past. But since version 4 was released and a recent push to implement an environment for a client I have been getting a heavy dose lately. We are running a PoC with Lab Manager to house the Development servers for a large corporation.
The setup and design challenges with Lab Manager make ESX look easy. Sure it sits on top of ESX but the possibilities are endless for the number of configurations that you can establish within the environment. You can configure physical/virtual networks, templates, pools, workspaces and countless other items. All this and the ability to offer a self service option to users with different levels of permissions to restart VM’s and deploy or destroy VM’s.
I will be writing more blog posts on Lab Manager in the weeks to come that will go into more depth on specific features.
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Posted by Brian on Feb 23, 2010 in VDI, VMware, View | View Comments
VMware working with RTO is nothing new. The two companies entered into a partnership last fall during VMworld 2009 to integrate the Virtual Profile technology into VMware View. With this purchase VMware can build this layering technology into the View product directly. This allows for the Operating sytems, user profile and applications to all be seperated out into individual layers.
While VMware is getting several of RTO’s products in this purchase the Virtual Profiles product that is a profile management solution is surely to be the gem in this deal.
You can view the press release here and for more questions see the FAQ’s document here.
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Posted by admin on Feb 21, 2010 in Tools | View Comments
The wonderful free tool from Rob was updated to a new version. You can download RVTools from his website. Be sure to thank the developer for all of his hard work.
- On vHost tab new field: number of running vCPUs
- On vSphere VMs in vApp where not displayed.
- Filter not working correct when annotations or custum fields contains null value.
- When NTP server(s) = null the time info fields are not displayed on the vHost tabpage.
- When datastore name or virtual machine name contains spaces the inconsistent foldername check was not working correct.
- Tools health check now only executed for running VMs.
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