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 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 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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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.

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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Since the release of View 4.0 VMware seems to be showing that they are very serious about achieving the same level of dominance in the VDI market that they share in server virtualization. VMware quickly followed up with View 4.5 that brought many needed features to level the feature set with Citrix’s offerings.

To continue proof that they are committed to this Desktop race VMware has announce a Certification track for the Desktop. The new program is called the VMware Certified – Desktop program and is made up of three certification levels. This new approach adds a new lower level certification that was not available with vSphere certifications.

VMware Desktop Certifications

• VMware Certified Associate 4 – Desktop (VCA4-DT): is directed toward Virtualization System Administrators who seek to demonstrate their ability to manage, monitor and troubleshoot desktop deployments and VMware View 4.5 components, as well as their knowledge of adjacent, complementary technologies to VMware solutions.
  Learn more.
• Coming soon! VMware Certified Professional 4 – Desktop (VCP4-DT) is directed toward Virtualization Systems Engineers who seek to demonstrate their ability to install and configure the VMware View environment and enable View Client users. Candidates must also be able to configure the vSphere environment, possess a deep understanding of VMware core components and their relation to storage and networking and be proficient in datacenter design methodologies.
• Coming soon! VMware Certified Advanced Professional – Desktop (VCAP-DT): is directed toward Virtualization Architects who seek to demonstrate their deep knowledge of VMware vSphere and VMware View design. Candidates will be able to expertly manage all aspects of the vSphere and View environments from installation and configuration to maintenance and troubleshooting. Candidates will also possess a deep knowledge of virtualization architectures and components and be able to architect VMware desktop solutions to meet specific customer business requirements.

Also as a first there will be no VMware course requirement to earn the VCA4-DT certification. Typically in the past the first level certifications have always required a VMware course. With more advanced levels leaving VMware courses as optional, figuring that most people able to acquire them would already possess the necessary skills.  You can see from the image that VMware is recommending a list of courses that would help candidates achieve the knowledge needed to take the first level exam.

I have to say that this has been a long time coming and I’m pretty glad to see that they have finally arrived. With the demand for VDI growing companies are looking for ways to see employee’s prove they have the skills necessary to successfully implement VDI. Also vendors are sure to welcome these certifications as a way to bolster their VDI sales pitches and prove they are worthy of your business.

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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Some of the expected new features are:

• 160+ Bug fixes
• Support for secure PCoIP tunneling
• Improvements in using Windows 7 SP1 RC as a remote desktop OS
• Better keyboard mapping support
• Enhanced USB device compatibility

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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• Be nicer to my storage administrator – He may be grumpy, frown alot, and have an affinity for spreadsheets, but he is in charge of the blocks.  So let’s throw out a nice comment or two, give him a pat on the back, and maybe share a bacon-enthused recipe.  We are on the same team after all!
• Automate more tasks using Orchestrator – Those tasks may be discordant now what with all the manual labor (and who likes labor?!).  It’s time for some syncopation!  Plus this will be a great way to dig more into an underrated product piece of vSphere!
• Develop a better method for documentation – Right now, my documentation is scattered amongst analog (notebooks) and digital (intarwebs, onenote, google docs, dropbox) sources.  It’s time to cull that together to be more organized, up to date, and concise.
• Blog more! – While blogging isn’t known for it’s ability to have the ladies come a callin’, it is a great way to help out the community.  After all, I have taken some much from the community in terms of helpful knowledge, it’s time I gave back more than I do now!
• Run that VMware health script each day – Sure you’ve been meaning to schedule it to be delivered to your inbox each morning so you can attack potential issues before they ruin your day.
• Get out and attend your local VMUG in 2011 – This is one I would like to see more people honor this coming year. The VMUG meetings are a great resource to network with others in your field.
• Learn something new each day – Could be as little as a new command for CLI or how to script a ESXi install.
• Work more in the home lab – This goes along with the previous entry about learning new things. If you have not yet setup a home lab I would highly recommend that you work on creating one.

So thanks again to everyone that I met in 2010 and read the blog and best of luck in 2011.

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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Here are the new features in View 4.5 per the VMware release notes.

• View Client with Local Mode – Provides the industry’s first integrated offline and server-hosted solution for desktop virtualization, addressing BYOPC use cases.
• Full Windows 7 support – Provides full support for Windows 7. With View 4.5 and ThinApp 4.6, organizations can migrate to Windows 7 at half the cost and time.
• View Client for Mac OS X – Enables Mac users to access hosted Windows virtual desktops, extending the BYOPC use cases to Mac users.
• Integrated Application Assignment – Simplifies the delivery of ThinApp applications to end-users using the View Administrator console.
• Rich Graphical Dashboards – Simplifies management and monitoring through improved reporting and diagnostics.
• Role Based Administration – Distributes IT tasks to the right administrator.
• Integration with Microsoft SCOM and PowerShell – Enables integration into existing management infrastructure to further simplify the management of View virtual desktops.
• Support for vSphere 4.1 and vCenter 4.1 – Delivers integration with the most widely-deployed desktop virtualization platform in the industry. Takes advantage of optimizations for View virtual desktops.
• Increased scalability – Allows you to deploy 10,000 virtual desktops per pod and use this modular architecture to scale out across your organization.
• Tiered storage support – Reduces the cost and increases the performance of storage by enabling you to take advantage of multiple storage tiers, including high performance and locally attached storage.
• Lowest Cost Reference Architectures – VMware has worked with partners such as Dell, HP, Cisco, NetApp, and EMC to provide prescriptive reference architectures to enable you to deploy a scalable and cost-effective desktop virtualization solution.

VMware View 4.5 Documentation

VMware View 4.5 download link

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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