Posts Tagged "VMware"

Voting for Top Virtualization blogs is now open

Posted by Brian on Jan 24, 2012 in VMware | 0 comments

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

 

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

Posted by Brian on Nov 17, 2011 in Cloud, Orchestrator, vCloud, VMware | 0 comments

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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