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Voting for Top Virtualization blogs is now open

Brian — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:51:13 +0000

This has become a tradition now for the last couple of years. Eric over at vsphere-land.com has opened up the voting for top virtualization blogs. This year brings the idea of special categories for blogs that focus on certain topics like scripting, VDI or something else.

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

http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/786135/Top-VMware-virtualization-blogs-2012

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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First look at new VMware View Client with PCoIP for Linux

Brian — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 13:16:34 +0000

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.

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.

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

Brian — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 15:48:04 +0000

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.

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

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How to monitor PCoIP performance in View 5 with WMI counters

Brian — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 13:42:00 +0000

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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Why the upcoming vCenter Operations Management Suite has me excited

Brian — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 13:21:48 +0000

I would like to start off by saying that it’s nice to see VMware starting to bundle up some of their offerings into more complete packages. Many of these tools were acquired recently and it takes time to integrate them with their own applications. I have not looked recently to see if there is any price advantage to buying the bundle versus the apps separately. The main thing is that they continue to add functionality by tightly integrating the apps to work together.

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.

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

Brian — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 16:16:37 +0000

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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VMware needs to integrate Orchestrator into vCloud Director more to improve Cloud automation

Brian — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 13:04:59 +0000

In working on several Cloud related projects one of the items that sticks out to me is the need for deeper automation within the vCloud Director product. I understand this is still just version 1.5, but with how hard VMware is pushing the “Your Cloud” journey. I think that some parts are just not ready for what some companies need to do in the way of automation.

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.

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Recap of Chicago VMUG User Conference 2011

Brian — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 04:41:18 +0000

Well October 31st and Halloween have come and gone and I’m just getting around to writing my recap. It was a busy day all round between the overwhelming success of Chicago’s first VMUG user conference and sugar overload from candy. I can’t say how proud I am of the turn out that the VMUG had. We broke an attendance record for a first time user conference with 500 people showing up at the conference. I believe the previous record was 390, so we have something to be proud of Chicago VMUG members.

The conference had speaking tracks from VMware and Partners on some great topics. I was able to attend sessions on View 5 and related products and a deep dive on ThinApp. Both were really good sessions with great speakers from VMware. I know that the VMUG leaders would like to thank everyone that came out to the conference and the Vendors that sponsored for making it all possible. But a huge thanks goes to VMware and the VMUG organization for helping plan this big event and making sure things went off without any issues.

I was able to meet a bunch of new VMUG members from Chicago and look forward to staying in contact with you all and meeting more. I hope that people that attended the user conference are able to attend our quarterly VMUG meetings that we hold. Growing our membership and creating a community around VMware in Chicago is a big part of the VMUG.

The Picture below is a view from the View 5 session that was presented by Josh from VMware. He covered all the infrastructure parts of View 5 and what roles they play. There were several good questions from the audience and he covered some real world implementation stories.

The image below is a picture from the exhibit space at the VMUG conference. We had tremendous vendor interest in the meeting. There was 55 boots in the space and some really great vendors and partners were there talking with VMUG members and helping them with products and solutions.

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Google had marked this site as having Malware

Brian — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 13:27:01 +0000

Recently I had a couple of people email me saying that Google was saying that this site contained Malware. Things have been very busy and I have not been able to write much lately. Will be working on getting back to regular writing soon. I searched for what Google thought was bad code and cleaned up everything. The site is fully patched and has no issues.

I have requested a review from Google to get off of their bad behavior list and should get the clean bill of health soon. If anyone still gets warnings few days after this post let me know in the comments or an email.

Thanks,

Brian

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Recent storms have shown the need for VDI

Brian — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 13:27:31 +0000

Just this week Chicago was rocked by a monster storm that knocked out power to 800,000 plus customers. This surely impacted a great number of businesses and homes. I personally was without power at home for 30 hours. I was able to continue to work by powering my home with a generator and some trips to the local Starbucks. But what would a business do if they are impacted by an extended outage?

So I ask the people reading this, how would your business be able to respond today if a large group of your end users were not able to work at their office for an extended period of time? This could be due to a power outage, winter storm, pandemic virus or terrorist attack. Would they be unable to complete any work and the business would lose revenue until access to the facility was restored?

These scenarios are great to start conversations about virtual desktops (VDI). Sure there are a ton of other benefits to using VDI, like rapid provisioning, security, compliance and many others. These are all talked about often when VDI is mentioned. But for me the notion that people cannot complete any work due to a non-business related factor in today’s world drives me crazy. Just last night on the news I saw a story about Los Angeles closing the 405 freeway for 30 hours and the panic that it was going to cause. What if your companies workers would be affected by this, would it not be of great comfort for your management to be able to tell workers to not bother attempting to come into the office during this closure and work form the comfort of their home. Sure there are some employees that have jobs that requires them to be in the office or in proximity to customers or equipment, but most knowledge workers do not have this need.

You are now probably asking well I know VDI can provide remote access to desktops but how would it help us in these types of scenarios. Well when properly designed a VDI environment will provide users access to their desktops from any device and any location. This means that if an office worker that does not bring a laptop home each day was told to not come into the office they would be able to work on their corporate virtual desktop from home using a home PC or compatible end point.

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