To give an example a marketing manager hires 3 new people and needs to have them added to the VDI environment. There may be forms to fill out to request or maybe its a ticket that needs to be submitted to request the desktops. But it would be much simpler if he could go to a web portal and fill in the new user details and make a couple of selections from options provided and BANG! a few minutes later he gets an email saying the desktops are ready and this is how his people can connect to them.

Now I don’t think this is that far off of an idea and with VMware already having the right tools to make this happen. I think that with a little hard work and the use of VMware Service Manager something like this could be created. Now some of you might have not heard of Service Manager (SM) before or maybe you’ve heard the name but don’t understand what it does. It seems like SM is a bit like Orchestrator in that people have heard the name but no one is using it. If you search the web there are almost no blog post written about SM and very few videos about SM even by VMware.

As of today I’m not sure if this would be possible in the current version of Service Manager or if it would require VMware to add this as a new feature. But it would be a good selling point for a misunderstood product that is not much different than a Unicorn right now. As of today SM has replaced VMware Request Manager as the tool used to provide VM request management for vCloud designs. So if a user wants request management in their VMware cloud they need to use SM. So this is right in the same ballpark and would be a big competitive advantage that Citrix is not offering right now.

I plan to try and setup SM in my lab soon and see if this is possible with the current version and provide any feedback on whether I was successful or not.

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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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

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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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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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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.

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 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.

a

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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For example if you are running ESX(i) on a mirrored pair of local drives, if you are a shop that does not have very good hardware monitoring you might have no idea of the health of this mirror that vSphere is running on. So this becomes even more important with more shops experimenting with running certain workloads on local disk. With VMware and storage companies creating Virtual Storage Appliances that can run on these local disks and still provide the benefits of shared storage, this becomes a must to understand what is happening in your local disks environment.

With the latest batch of CIM drivers from HP they are now exposing some of these details. You can now see the drive configurations and status. The image below shows that a drive is rebuilding in the RAID config. This should be a feature that many HP shops will be happy to see. If you have noticed any other good features from this update leave a note in the comments for others.

a

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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I spoke with an End User Computing (EUC) specialist today and got some of the following details. The idea behind Thinapp Factory is an appliance that will auto package Thinapps for you. You will point it towards an MSI or install file for an application. For example the Firefox install file. Then Thinapp Factory will auto spin up and Virtual Machine (VM) and do the application packaging for you. It will then generate a Thinapp EXE package for you. Right now only EXE files are available but MSI packages will be coming as the product matures.

To start Thinapp Factory will be able to package applications that follow standard MSI sequencing standards. As additional applications are certified VMware will continue to add them to the Factory. So this only leaves applications that cannot be done easy for you to have to package manually.

One thing of note also the VMware person told me was that if you point Thinapp Factor at 6 applications to install it will auto spin up 6 separate VMs and package them individually for you. I look forward to hearing and seeing more on this product.

If you found out any more details about this drop the details in a comment below and share with others.

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 thing this morning I grabbed breakfast in the massive dinning hall for VMworld. The hall is a seeming endless sea of tables. It reminded me of being directed to a parking spot at a sporting event, the wait staff was there to guide attendees to available food tables.

My first session started a 8am sharp as was VSP1682 VMware vSphere Cluster Q&A presented by Duncan Epping and Frank Denneman. The session was one hour long and was an open Q&A session about all things HA, Cluster, DRS and Storage DRS. There was a wide range of question from people stating they don’t use HA to people with advanced designs wondering how the new features will affect them.

One of the other sessions that I attended was the ESXi Quiz Show (VSP1956). This was more of a fun session than a deep technical lecture session. The idea of the session is that 2 separate of teams competed against each other with the winner moving on to battle against a team of VMware employees. The questions were mostly ESXi related with a few general VMware questions. The session was high energy and they did a good job of getting people excited and involved.

I took sometime to experience the Hands On Labs (HOL) just to see what was happening there. Most of the topics available as labs are things that I am doing on a regular basis or do not pertain to my job at this time. So there was really not anything that I needed to take a lab for but just wanted to so I can know how they stack up when talking with others. I elected to take the ESXi Auto Deploy lab which was the most appealing to me. The lab was about 70-80 minutes in length and the instructions and slides that guide you along the process were very well written and easy to follow. The only thing I would maybe improve is some of the install parts were a bit slow and could have probably already been done for the participants to speed things up.

So far one thing that I noticed and heard from several others is that most of the sessions are very high level. These are great for customers and management but do not offer enough deep content for partners. It is causing me to revisit the sessions that I have signed up for and will be spending a good deal of my time talking with vendors in the solutions exchange.

VMworld Keynote

It was now time for the keynote and with this being my first VMworld I was not sure what to expect from this large presentation. The room was huge and must have easily held 10,000+ people. It was a top notch event and the presentation was perfect, except for the boom camera guy accidentally got in the way of the other camera once.

The keynote opened with some thundering music and great visuals on the large screens on both sides of the main stage. The visuals were almost Tron like in some parts and the image below shows how they took videos from users that submitted them and the audio and incorporated this into the intro.

First up on stage was Rick Jackson who presented the agenda for the Keynote. Rick also gave an attendee count of over 19,000 people for this conference. He mentioned that VMworld 2012 will be back in San Francisco and will be August 27-30. Then he spoke about how they originally created the Hands On Labs cloud in 2009 as an internal cloud. Then in 2010 the HOL cloud because a Hybrid Cloud and the 2011 HOL Cloud is not a Public cloud with 3 separate data centers in different geographical regions. A goal for the labs this year is to deploy more that 200,000 VMs in the 4 days of the conference. This will be a tall task even with the number last of 140,000 VMs.

Then it was time for Paul Maritz to come out and speak. I think Paul usually does a good job and it helps to have some exciting technology to talk about. I will cover more of the specifics of the Keynote shortly but I have to say that a large part of the keynote content was focused on application platforms which are very important but the audience that was there is largely VMware admins and infrastructure people and they were just not that interested. I saw a steady stream of people leaving the keynote after the halfway point.

In Paul’s presentation he talked about creating the Cloud Suite and getting all version numbers in alignment. He stated that he expects that by next VMworld they will be announcing version 5.1 of each product within the Cloud Suite. This would continue the aggressive pace that VMware has been on over the last few years by announcing a major update to their base hypervisor offering.

Some fun facts that he spoke about during the keynote are listed below.

• About 800,000 VMware admins globaly
• There are now about 68,000 VCP’s from 146 countries
• A new VM is created every 6 seconds, more thamn 20 Millions VMs around the globe exist
• A 5.5 vMotions every second, there are more VMs in flight than plains

It was announced that View 5 is expected in the future. This is a product that I am heavily involved with and would like to find out any new details possible. Below are a few bullet points that were mentioned.

• Bandwidth improvements
• View clients will be available for almost every device you can think of
• VOIP / Unified Communications

Paul did talk briefly about the mobile phone virtualization offering that they are working on. This seems like it would be pretty cool and once they figure out how to perfect it and phone technology is powerful enough to support I can see this catching on.

 The remaining parts of the show were all vFabric and application platform discussions. I’m not going to write about this because it’s not a focus for me or this blog at this time and someone else can probably do a much better job at it. I do think these products are important but not in my area.

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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