With the 6248 fabric interconnects they follow the path that the Nexus 5K series from Cisco have gone with all the ports being Unified Ports. Meaning they can do 1/10GigE or Fibre Channel. I like this direction because it offers more ports and greater flexibility for the FI’s and customers. But when it comes to configuring the FC uplink ports it’s not as clear as it was in the past. You would think that if you right clicked any of the ports you would be presented with an option to make the port an FC port but that’s not the case.

Below I am outlining the steps it takes to enable ports for FC uplink status.

Step 1: You will make sure you are on the equipment tab, then click on the first Fabric Interconnect. In the window to the right you will see the following options in the Actions area. You will need to click on the Configure Unified Ports option.

Step 2: You are going to see a window open that matches the one in Image 2 below. This shows a visual presentation of the ports in your fabric interconnect. The most important thing here is the somewhat obscure white slider bar that is just below the image. I have pointed an arrow to it. When you first arrive at this screen the slider will be all the way to the right, I have slide it 2 rows to the left. This will allow me to configure the last 4 ports as FC uplinks. You can adjust for what you require for your UCS design.

Image 2

Step 3: In image 3 below I have placed a box around the ports that I intend on changing to be FC Uplink ports to make sure it’s clear.

Image 3

Step 4: The last thing to do in this part of the config is to right click on each port and choose Configure as FC Uplink Port. This will allow you to connect to your switching fabric.

Image 4

Step 5: After doing this on the first FI it will tell you that it needs to reboot. Once the FI has rebooted you will need to do this same config change on the 2nd FI.

Step 6: Now when you look in the tree and find the section for FC Uplinks you will see the ports that we configured. Now make sure the proper VSAN is enabled for each port and you should be ready to proceed with the rest of your install.

I want to say thanks to my coworker “Mr UCS” Steve Pantol for the heads up on this saving me time trying to figure this out.

About Brian

Brian is a Technical Architect for a VMware partner and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and is helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. This blog Virtualize Tips was started to document and remember things that I come across while working with tech.

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I am not surprised by the lack of prep material since it’s a design based exam. In my opinion this is one of the exams that you just need the real world experience of working with the product over time to be confident that you have the knowledge to pass the test.

Of course I’m not going to spit out a bunch of questions that you should study. The test does present a bunch of different design scenarios that might cover things like environmental variables, security questions or technical requirements. You then must make your choice based upon the given parameters. The part that I was least happy with was how little content there was about actual UCS design decisions. Sure there were things like converged networking and cabling, but actual questions that required you to build a design were somewhat limited. The exam seemed to focus more on the overall Cisco data center methodology rather than just UCS as you would think.

About Brian

Brian is a Technical Architect for a VMware partner and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and is helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. This blog Virtualize Tips was started to document and remember things that I come across while working with tech.

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I would appreciate your votes if you have the time please fill out the survey. I am listed in the full blog list and in the VDI category. So remember to cast a vote for VirtualizeTips.com. You can vote HERE

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Thanks,

Brian

About Brian

Brian is a Technical Architect for a VMware partner and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and is helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. This blog Virtualize Tips was started to document and remember things that I come across while working with tech.

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To start off after open the View Client you will see a screen that looks like the one below in Image 1. Looks pretty much like all other View Clients, you enter the View Connection Server URL and connect.

Image 1

Once you have tried to connect to the connection server you will be prompted for your login credentials as shown in Image 2 below. The screen shows you what connection server URL you are trying to connect to, mine is blocked out in the image. You can also see to the left of the server URL a warning sign with an unlocked paddle is shown, this is letting me know there is not Certs installed on my connection server. Other than those items its user name, password and domain.

Image 2

Now that we have authenticated we are presented with a list of pools within View that our user ID is entitled to as show in Image 3 below.

Image 3

On Image 4 below you can see that I’ve clicked on the “All Monitors” option that shows me what options I have for monitors and screen sizes for my View Client window.

Image 4

The next option to look at was the display protocol, you can see in the previous image that PCoIP was the default protocol for the pool. In Image 5 below I click on PCoIP and was presented with the option to choose between PCoIP and RDP. This was because this action is allowed on the pool that I was trying to connect to.

Image 5

The final step was to click on the Pool name and I was connected to my View desktop. This is the first I have really had the time to test the Linux View client. I’m pretty happy with what I saw and adding PCoIP support to the Linux platform client is a pretty big deal. In my opinion this gives companies another option of what OS they can now place on their PC endpoints if they do not want to pay for a Windows License. Of course the licensing question is much large depending on if you pay for SA or you purchased a license with the endpoint. But there are plenty of companies out there that could benefit from this approach.

About Brian

Brian is a Technical Architect for a VMware partner and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and is helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. This blog Virtualize Tips was started to document and remember things that I come across while working with tech.

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With the release of VMware View 5 came a new feature for persona management or the ability to capture / virtualize the user profile. This is very huge in VDI and is something that VMware has been working towards for awhile now. If you remember they purchased RTO software and have been working on incorporating those features into View. This is the first release with the RTO profile software built in. I do think that VMware will continue to improve and expand these features in upcoming releases.

But all things said I think that View 5 has a lot to offer around user profiles. If you are looking at deploying View 5 give these features a serious look before selecting any 3rd part tool for profile management. Depending on what you user needs are and your admin requirements, View 5 might have everything you need built in.

The persona management features in View 5 are built to work alone or in unison with Windows roaming profiles. The profile is redirected most commonly to a network share. This network share can be backed up via your normal methods and will give you the option of restoring profiles from backups in case of corruption or security concerns. View 5 persona’s are an improvement over roaming profiles because the profile is not copied down on log in or back up at log out. This speeds the process up greatly. The View GPO’s allow for more granular control over the profile’s behavior.

From the image below you can see that enabling the persona management for a pool or group of users is driving off of modifying the group policy for the OU that the desktops or users are located in. To turn on the base features all that is need is to enabled the highlighted key from the image.

Enabeling VMware View Persona Management

In the next image I am showing the option to enable persona management. It’s really an on or off selection, the only other setting is the upload interval in minutes. This controls the upload of any parts of the profile that are download into the VDI desktop while the user is logged in.

How to enable VMware View Persona Management

The next GPO object that I am showing is how to specify the location of the users profile. This is the network share that you want the profile to be stored on. There is the option of specifying the location yourself or using the location that is entered in the users AD account.

Select location to store View Persona profile

The next image is showing an entire GPO folder dedicated to Folder Redirection. This is included when you load the View ADM files that allow for persona management. These allow for easy redirection of specific folders within a users profile that you might want to redirect to a location rather than capture them in the profile. I won’t bore you with the reasons for this because this is nothing new or specific to View persona mgmt. If you are using roaming profiles or a 3rd party profile mgmt tool you will also be considering redirecting some folders.

VMware View Persona Management folder redirection

The image below is showing how I was redirection the users Desktop folder within the profile. I am pointing it to a network share and using the %username% variable just as like the previous steps. To redirect a folder is as simple as enabling the option and providing the location to store it.

VMware View Persona Management desktop folder redirection

The next image below shows a few options that allow you to control the visibility of the profile being redirected. Things like showing a progress window for profile downloads in the background or if icons are displayed in the tray.

VMware View Persona Management

This last image is showing the options are logging.

• Logging File name: The full path name of the local View Persona Management log file.  This path should include the file name, and cannot be a UNC path.
• Logging Destination: Specifies where log message will be sent. Log message can be sent to a local log file and also the debug port.
• Logging Flags: Specifies the type of log messages that are generated. (Log error messages or Informational messages)
• Debug flags: Specifies the type of debug messages that are generated. Debug messages are handled the same as log messages.

VMware View Persona Management

About Brian

Brian is a Technical Architect for a VMware partner and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and is helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. This blog Virtualize Tips was started to document and remember things that I come across while working with tech.

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You can view these counters in Perfmon if you have access to the PC or the end user is familiar enough to help collect the data. Or if you have a tool that is capable of monitoring or collecting this data you will be able to add these to your standard monitoring rules. I plan on setting up some of the common monitoring tools in a lab when there is time and testing how they work with these new counters.

In the image below you can see the 5 new PCoIP sections that are available in Perfmon. Each of these has a number of counters that will help you monitor and trouble shoot PCoIP sessions for your View 5 users.

In the next image I am showing the counters available under the PCoIP network statistics section. This will give you details about network stats within the View session. You can monitor bandwidth, latency and packet loss for example.

On the next image I fired up a session and started to monitor the network settings for my PCoIP session. You can see below that I was looking at my latency and it was all over the board. This is because I was running from my house and the internet there is line of sight and well lets just say it sucks. But it is fairly useful for testing things like this because I get to see how they perform on bad connections.

 I have take shows of the remaining counters available for monitoring and shown them below. These counters focus on general PCoIP stats, Audio, Video/Image and USB related statistics for the View session. Over all I’m glad to see these new features added to view. Now I am waiting to see how tool makers adapter their products to take advantage of these new features. I am very eagerly waiting to get a look at vCenter Operations for View coming out in early 2012.

Update December 22, 2011:

I have listed out the different WMI classes and their explanations below. This should help you with understanding what each does.

PCoIP Network Statistics

General PCoIP Sessions Statistics

PCoIP Audio Statistics

PCoIP Imaging Statistics

PCoIP USB Statistics

About Brian

Brian is a Technical Architect for a VMware partner and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and is helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. This blog Virtualize Tips was started to document and remember things that I come across while working with tech.

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The new vCenter Operations Management Suite has 4 versions available for the package, you can view the table here to compare versions. The highest version available is the Enterprise Plus, it looks like maybe VMware is starting to standardize on their version naming to match what vSphere has been using for years. This version offers the performance monitoring of vCOPs, Infrastructure Navigator, Chargeback manager and Configuration Manager. Until recently you would normally have to purchase these all separately and the cost was per VM based and could be pretty expensive for large environments.

One of the features that has me most excited was the integration between configuration manager and vCOPs. I saw a demo and cannot find it again right now. It showed that when viewing a host for example that is experiencing a performance issue you can correlate the change in performance with any configuration changes that took place at the same time the issue started. So if another team member or maybe yourself was updating a value on network cards and it did not produce any noticeable errors during the change. But vCOPs was tracking a change in performance the new suite will help brings these 2 separate tracks of information together to help fix issues and find root causes faster. Once I can find the screen shot again I will try to remember to update this post with it.

About Brian

Brian is a Technical Architect for a VMware partner and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and is helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. This blog Virtualize Tips was started to document and remember things that I come across while working with tech.

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The ability to monitor performance of the connections between the endpoints and the VMs running in the data center is a vital metric that needs to be tackled by VMware. This is something that Citrix is already delivering with XenDesktop and I like what they are doing so far. You can see the latency measurement between the connection and also information like client version, IP addresses and broker that it connected through. All very helpful information for troubleshooting performance and connection issues.

I like the fact that VMware has added counters for Windows that can be monitored using Perfmon inside the OS, and you can always fire this up to look at something. But I think this needs to continue to develop further to make these connection and performance issues easy to continually monitor and troubleshoot. In the preview videos that VMware posted on this blog post are mostly centered around monitoring the infrastructure, this is what vCOPs already does. The last video did show some tasty nugguets about PCoIP monitoring which looks promising. But some type of a client summary page would be very helpful so Admins do not have to drill down into 10 screens to get the picture unless they want that level of detail. It also needs to provide performance monitoring for client connections and end user experience. Below is a list of things that I think would be very helpful in a VMware View deployment to monitor.

• PCoIP connection latency
• VM login times
• Client version
• Connection server client is connected through
• Connection type (PCoIP vs. RDP)

Below is a sample of what Citrix is offering today with their XenDesktop product. From this session screen you can shadow session which I wish VMware would add into View Manager. Then there are details about latency, connection type, endpoint details, which items are enabled within the HDX/ICA protocol. Overall a pretty good looking and helpful console from Citrix.

The lower part of the same screen shows you some hypervisor and broker health status. There is a simple graph that shows you CPU, Memory and Network usage for the VM that you are looking at.

About Brian

Brian is a Technical Architect for a VMware partner and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and is helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. This blog Virtualize Tips was started to document and remember things that I come across while working with tech.

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If self-service is suppose to be such a big part of Cloud, then the need for automation is going to play a big part. Not everything can be accomplished from creating templates and using customization to change the identity of the new VM. In server virtualization this worked great and saved time for most IT shops. But there were still manual processes that some shops needed to do. This breaks the idea of self-service IT, if a user still relies on someone to execute a manual process to have a VM or application provisioned from vCloud.

I guess what this mostly deals with is private cloud. Many IT shops are trying to automate the creation of as many servers and platforms as possible, to reduce their work load in provisioning new servers. But there are still some manual processes that need to take place and I think that being able to tie vCenter Orchestrator more tightly with vCloud Director could go a long way in help this issue.

Other cloud software companies such as DynamicOps are already doing this type of thing. By making the workflow or automation part of their offerings built into the same admin console. This allows for tight integration and opens up the options for what you are allowed to automate.

If you listen to rumors and in dark alleys you might hear that this type of integration is coming from VMware in a future release. Nobody knows if it will be the next release or even when that will happen.

About Brian

Brian is a Technical Architect for a VMware partner and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and is helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. This blog Virtualize Tips was started to document and remember things that I come across while working with tech.

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If you are guessing or making too many assumptions about your users, the design is going to either be extremely over solution-ed or will perform badly. By doing your homework you are collecting the data that will allow you to make intelligent decisions on CPU, disk and network performance that will be required.

There are a few applications on the market that do this type of desktop assessment, Liquidware Labs and Lakeside Software are the leaders in this space. In this post I am showing the more valuable slides from the presentation that is created by the Stratusphere Fit tool after collecting data from your PCs.

To deploy the tool you only need to import a Virtual Appliance and assign it an IP address and DNS name. You then export a collection install file that needs to be pushed out or installed on any computer that you wish to collect data from. You can create user and machine groups for different use cases or any logical grouping that might tie in with your design or business case.

I have pasted slides from the presentation below and have made some notes around a few of the slides. This is a sample report that I created using a test environment. There was no grouping setup so a few slides were removed that would present data based on groups. This is just to provide an idea of what type of data you can get by doing an assessment and what Liquidware Labs can help you with.

Besides the presentation below there are a number of built in reports that you can pull or schedule to run on a reoccurring basis. There are several output formats that you can export reports in such as PDF, Excel and Word, among others. There is a good report that will give you summaries of user data and types of files being stored. This is very helpful when planning for profile storage.

The slide below is the opening image that you can customize with Vendor and Customer information.

This slide shows details about the scope of the assessment, such as date range, number of desktops, users and groups.

The slide below shows some of the ranges of how decisions for the Fit ratings will be calculated.

The slide below is showing the number of computers and which group they were placed in.

The slide below is showing peak and averages for all desktops and the different metrics that are measured.

The slide below is probably my favorite one. It shows the averages for all desktops hourly for a week day. So you can see the IOPs are high first thing in the morning when users are logging in and then look for other details that will aid in your design.

The next slide is showing details about the physical desktops, such as age, CPU and Memory usage.

The next slide gives details about the different CPUs that are in your desktops and their utilization.

The next slide covers the physical memory configuration in the desktops.

The next slide gives a breakdown of what Operating System is installed on the desktops being monitored.

The next slide covers local storage on the desktops. You will get a rough idea of sizes and how much data is being used. Note: there are much more detailed reports that can be run to find out more about user data.

The following slide covers devices connected to PCs, you can see that a lot of local or built in devices show up on this report also.

The following slide covers monitors and printers.

The next slide shows a summary of the most used applications.

The next slide shows applications that are used most based on time.

The next slide is application related and covers CPU utilization.

Now an application view related to memory consumed.

And finally an application view that relates to IO consumed.

The next slide is showing applications and a graphics intensity rating.

The next slide shows a view on how your desktops are for VDI candidates.

The next slide is showing how your users will fit as VDI candidates.

The next slide is covering how different applications qualify as Virtualization candidates.

The next slide is showing a list of machines and highlighting PCs that are on the bubbles or are not good candidates for VDI.

The next slide is showing a list of Users and highlighting user accounts that are on the bubbles or are not good candidates for VDI.

About Brian

Brian is a Technical Architect for a VMware partner and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and is helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. This blog Virtualize Tips was started to document and remember things that I come across while working with tech.

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