VDI

First look at new VMware View Client with PCoIP for Linux

Posted by Brian on Jan 12, 2012 in PCoIP, VDI, View, VMware | 1 comment

Recently VMware released a preview copy of the new View 5 client for Linux that now supports PCoIP. This has been a long time coming, along with the Linux version the Apple version now includes PCoIP support also. I don’t plan on boring you with the install details as most of you are probably more advanced at installing applications on Linux then I am.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

 

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How to configure user persona management in View 5 – User Profiles

Posted by Brian on Jan 9, 2012 in VDI, View, VMware | 0 comments

I was upgrading the lab at work a while back to View 5 and getting familiar with the new Persona Management features. So I thought it would be a good idea to put some of this in writing to share with others. Because I did not see much detailed information around this. In this post I will show you how easy it is to get user persona working in View 5 and how these features are setup and configured. This might be some what of a lengthy post but should be worth the read.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

 

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.

 

 

 

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How to monitor PCoIP performance in View 5 with WMI counters

Posted by Brian on Dec 14, 2011 in VDI, View, VMware | 0 comments

Along with the many other features that are new in VMware View 5, there are now WMI counters to monitor and report on PCoIP performance. In this post I will highlight some of the ones that I think are most valuable. At first I was kind of mixed about how I felt VMware choose to implement these features. But for those of you that have tools that can monitor Windows PC’s via WMI or are used to using Perfmon you will have no learning curve for this.

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

RoundTripLatencyms	Round trip latency in milliseconds between the PCoIP server and thePCoIP client.
RXBWkbitPersec	Overall bandwidth for incoming PCoIP packets averaged over thesampling period, in seconds
RXBWPeakkbitPersec	Peak bandwidth in kilobits per second for incoming PCoIP packets over aone-second sampling period
RXPacketLossPercent	Percentage of received packets lost during a sampling period
TXBWkbitPersec	Overall bandwidth for outgoing PCoIP packets averaged over thesampling period, in seconds.
TXBWActiveLimitkbitPersec	Estimated available network bandwidth in kilobits per second. Thisstatistic is updated once per second
TXBWLimitkbitPersec	Transmission bandwidth limit in kilobits per second for outgoing packets.The limit is the minimum of the following values:n GPO bandwidth limit for the PCoIP clientn GPO bandwidth limit for the PCoIP server n Bandwidth limit for the local network connection n Negotiated bandwidth limit for the Zero Client firmware based on encryption limits
TXPacketLossPercent	Percentage of transmitted packets lost during a sampling period

 

General PCoIP Sessions Statistics

BytesReceived	Total number of bytes of PCoIP data that have been received since thePCoIP session started
BytesSent	Total number of bytes of PCoIP data that have been transmitted since thePCoIP session started
PacketsReceived	Total number of packets that have been received successfully since thePCoIP session started. Not all packets are the same size
PacketsSent	Total number of packets that have been transmitted since the PCoIPsession started. Not all packets are the same size
RXPacketsLost	Total number of received packets that have been lost since the PCoIPsession started
SessionDurationSeconds	Total number of seconds that the PCoIP Session has been open
TXPacketsLost	Total number of transmitted packets that have been lost since the PCoIPsession started.

PCoIP Audio Statistics

AudioBytesReceived	Total number of bytes of audio data that have been received since thePCoIP session started.
AudioBytesSent	Total number of bytes of audio data that have been sent since the PCoIPsession started.
AudioRXBWkbitPersec	Bandwidth for ingoing audio packets averaged over the sampling period,in seconds
AudioTXBWLimitkbitPersec	Transmission bandwidth limit in kilobits per second for outgoing audiopackets. The limit is defined by a GPO setting
AudioTXBWkbitPersec	Bandwidth for outgoing audio packets averaged over the samplingperiod, in seconds.

PCoIP Imaging Statistics

ImagingBytesReceived	Total number of bytes of imaging data that have been received since the PCoIP session started
ImagingBytesSent	Total number of bytes of imaging data that have been transmitted since the PCoIP session started.
ImagingDecoderCapabilitykbitPersec	Estimated processing capability of the imaging decoder in kilobits per second. This statistic is updated once per second
ImagingEncodedFramesPersec	Number of imaging frames that were encoded over a one-second samplingperiod.
ImagingActiveMinimumQuality	Lowest encoded quality value on a scale from 0 to 100. This statistic is updated once per second. This counter does not correspond to the GPO setting for minimum quality
ImagingRXBWkbitPersec	Bandwidth for incoming imaging packets averaged over the sampling period, in seconds.
ImagingTXBWkbitPersec	Bandwidth for outgoing imaging packets averaged over the sampling period, in seconds.

PCoIP USB Statistics

USBBytesReceived	Total number of bytes of USB data that have been received since the PCoIP session started.
USBBytesSent	Total number of bytes of USB data that have been transmitted since the PCoIP session started.
USBRXBWkbitPersec	Bandwidth for incoming USB packets averaged over the sampling period, in seconds
USBTXBWkbitPersec	Bandwidth for outgoing USB packets averaged over the sampling period, in seconds.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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What could vCenter Operations for VMware View mean or help with – vCOPs

Posted by Brian on Nov 20, 2011 in Performance, VDI, View, VMware | 0 comments

The world is just now starting to get a glimpse of what vCenter Operations for View could be like. I really hope that this product comes out of the gate with a strong feature set and delivers a big win for VMware. This would really strengthen their VDI offering.

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.

 

 

 

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VDI desktop assessment sample report from Stratusphere FIT

Posted by Brian on Nov 15, 2011 in VDI | 0 comments

If you are thinking about starting or are currently working on a VDI project, you need to do some type of assessment on your current desktops. Without collecting performance and usage data from your current PCs you will only be guessing what on how to design your infrastructure for VDI.

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Everything you wanted to know about how VMware View local mode or offline mode works

Posted by Brian on Jun 3, 2011 in VDI, View, VMware | 8 comments

So I’ve been working with a customer on a specific use case that required extensive use of VMware View Local Mode. I will explain more about this in a moment. To sound a bit like a bad TV show, the names in this story have been changed to protect the innocent. First I’ll talk a bit about the customers requirements and then explain how View Local Mode works.

Now on to the customer use case that brought up all these questions and led me to do some deep dive research into View Local Mode operations. The use case that I was looking into was for a consulting firm. They have teams of consultants that work at customer locations 80% of the time and are only in a remote office 20% of their time. There would be 1500 mobile users and 500 office workers who would be working in a connected mode, meaning they are always in an office or a location with a network connection.

So naturally we talked about several designs that might work for them. There are 2 primary ones that would meet their needs and both would be built with VMware View 4.6.

Design #1

This design would use VMware View 4.6 to provide virtual desktops to 2000 users. The office workers are the easy part. They would be provided virtual desktops via Linked Clones and their profiles will be layered with one of the 3rd party profile tools. A few of the tools out today are AppSense, Liquidware Labs Profile unity, RingCube, UniDesk and several others.

Now the mobile users would be provided persistent desktops from View with the option to check out for Local Mode. This would allow users to check out their desktop so that it will run locally on their laptop. The checkout process will take a while because the first time a user checks out they must download the entire virtual machine. Once checked out they can replicate changes back to the datacenter to keep the copy that is locked in the datacenter up to date. This way if there is a disaster on their laptop they can recover up to the point of their last sync. This method is pretty straightforward to design, the only drawbacks with this method would be the additional disk space required and they will need to be managed like a standard PC when it comes to OS patching. The benefit to this method is by using persistent virtual machines the user only needs to check out the entire VM once, unless they are checking it out on a different end point. This greatly reduces time and bandwidth requirements.

Design #2

With this design we are still trying to accomplish the same goal, were just going about it a different way. The connected office workers will be designed in the same manor as Design #1. The difference comes in how we design for the mobile users. In this architecture we want to use the benefits of Linked Clones in VMware View. This will allow us to save on disk space and will take less effort to manage OS level patching. Since there is just a parent image to keep up to date and then all Linked Clones will pull from that image.

The tricky part comes in with using the Transfer servers and users having to do the initial image sync on check out. Then each time the parent image is recomposed for something like patching every Local Mode user will have to download the entire parent image again. This is a lot of data to pull down for 1500 users across 45 remote offices. So we will need a method to ease this burden.

The initial idea was hey we can just put the View Transfer servers out in the remote offices and users can pull their data for a local server. Well that turned out to be not possible, I will explain in more detail below. The option that was uncovered was the ability to use a Web proxy to cache data at the remote site that the users data would flow through. This proxy would only be able to cache the parent image data since other disks would be user specific. Once the first user pulled down the updated parent image the proxy would populate the cache and would speed up the process for the next users. You can find out more about this in the View administration PDF guide. The OS delta disk and user persistent disk would still be pulled down from the datacenter across the WAN in this design.

Facts about VMware View Transfer servers

A transfer server is a server that will handle the communications for users when they check out or in a View desktop. They will access a compressed version of the parent image being used for the Linked Clone View pool that the user is a member of. If you are allowing a persistent desktop to be checked out the transfer server does not cache these and it will just be pulled directly from the datastore that it sits on.

• Transfer server must be a virtual server on vSphere & part of same vCenter of View install
• Transfer servers should be kept in Datacenter near vSphere hosts and storage that contains the parent image
• They do not cache the delta disks or user Persistent disks, these must be pulled directly from the source
• You can check out and in desktops via View Security server but speed is slower, around 50% of direct speed
• After a recompose of parent image you will be required to download entire image again
• VMware recommends about 20 max concurrent transfers per server. At this point through testing a 1gb network connection will become saturated. So you will need to scale the number of transfer servers based on this. It really depends on how many concurrent transfers you expect to have as there is no assigned users hard limit.
• If you have multiple transfer servers they will use a repository to store the compressed image, this is just a CIFS or NFS share that all server must have access to.

If you have more questions about how anything works on this process drop your question in the comments and I will try and get you an answer. I will also try and keep this post up to date as new things are discovered about the Local Mode process.

 

 

 

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