Posted by Brian on Feb 24, 2010 in Citrix, XenDesktop | View Comments
I found a new white paper released from Citrix today that talks about steps you can take to really optimize your XP images. Sure everyone thinks about things like turning off a few unused services, screen savers and power saving features. But this paper takes a deep dive into a list of settings that you can manually change and explains others that are available in the XenConvert optimizer tool from Citrix. Head on over to Citrix and grab the doc here.
- Offers a better alternative than replacing the default user profile (which isn’t supported and doesn’t help for users that already have profiles)
- Makes a distinction between private mode (1:1) and standard mode (1:many) desktops
- Provides the actual registry keys/values for all optimizations (to ensure that all settings can be set by Group Policy or login scripts)
- Gives best practices for optimizing the user profiles (like installing UPHclean)
- Excludes configurations and steps that don’t help (like defragmenting a disk before performing a volume copy)
- Details what registry changes are included in the XenConvert Optimizer tool (so you know what all those checkboxes are doing)
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Posted by Brian on Feb 23, 2010 in Lab Manager, VMware | View Comments
I had never really had much time to delve into Lab Manager that deeply in the past. But since version 4 was released and a recent push to implement an environment for a client I have been getting a heavy dose lately. We are running a PoC with Lab Manager to house the Development servers for a large corporation.
The setup and design challenges with Lab Manager make ESX look easy. Sure it sits on top of ESX but the possibilities are endless for the number of configurations that you can establish within the environment. You can configure physical/virtual networks, templates, pools, workspaces and countless other items. All this and the ability to offer a self service option to users with different levels of permissions to restart VM’s and deploy or destroy VM’s.
I will be writing more blog posts on Lab Manager in the weeks to come that will go into more depth on specific features.
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Posted by Brian on Feb 23, 2010 in VDI, VMware, View | View Comments
VMware working with RTO is nothing new. The two companies entered into a partnership last fall during VMworld 2009 to integrate the Virtual Profile technology into VMware View. With this purchase VMware can build this layering technology into the View product directly. This allows for the Operating sytems, user profile and applications to all be seperated out into individual layers.
While VMware is getting several of RTO’s products in this purchase the Virtual Profiles product that is a profile management solution is surely to be the gem in this deal.
You can view the press release here and for more questions see the FAQ’s document here.
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Posted by admin on Feb 21, 2010 in Tools | View Comments
The wonderful free tool from Rob was updated to a new version. You can download RVTools from his website. Be sure to thank the developer for all of his hard work.
- On vHost tab new field: number of running vCPUs
- On vSphere VMs in vApp where not displayed.
- Filter not working correct when annotations or custum fields contains null value.
- When NTP server(s) = null the time info fields are not displayed on the vHost tabpage.
- When datastore name or virtual machine name contains spaces the inconsistent foldername check was not working correct.
- Tools health check now only executed for running VMs.
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Posted by admin on Feb 21, 2010 in Knowledge Base, VMware | View Comments
This is something that I had encountered when testing VM’s in our PoC for XenDesktop recently. We could come back after a few hours and find the VM in a hung state or in sleep mode. The sleep mode symptom was a obvious sign of were to start looking. After playing with the power settings a few times and turning off all of the options the issues went away.
According to a new KB article from VMware this is more of a common problem. Stop by here for the original document.
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Posted by admin on Feb 13, 2010 in Microsoft, VDI, XenDesktop | View Comments
For those of you that have taken a deep look into VDI or have deployed solutions you should be familar with the latest Microsoft trick to milk more cash from corporations. As far as I’m concerned this is a cheap way to charge more money for now added features and pad their pockets because they did not jump into the VDI game.
Ok to explain things a bit more. Basically Microsoft requires you to purchase your desktop license (XP/Win7) of course. But if you want to do a VDI solution using XenDesktop you mush also purchase a RS or terminal services license and a VECD license. This VECD is listed as needed if you wish to run a workstation OS in a data center. This license can cost from $23 to $100 plus depending on what your end point device is and if its covered under Software Assurance. This is all additional cost on top of the Citrix XenDesktop license that you need to purchase.
I was blown away when the Microsoft rep’s were explaining this to us in a recent call. And the fact they can tell people this with a straight face amazes me.
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Posted by admin on Nov 11, 2009 in VMware, vSphere | View Comments
Something to watch out for with the ESX 4 console. If you hit CTRL-ALT-DEL on ESX 4 console, the server will reboot even if there are running VMs and it doesn’t matter if the server is not in Maintenance Mode.
Follow these steps to disable this yourself:
1. Edit /etc/inittab. Any text editors will do- I like nano but vi works just as well.
2. Search for “CTRL-ALT-DELETE” or “ctrlaltdel”
3. Comment out the line “ca::ctrlaltdel:/sbin/shutdown -t3 -r now” with a # symbol.
It should look like:
# Trap CTRL-ALT-DELETE
# ca::ctrlaltdel:/sbin/shutdown -t3 -r now
4. Save and exit the file.
5. To make this take effect without a reboot, run the command:
init q
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