Eric Sloof

This document discusses the use cases for the different types of graphics acceleration available for View virtual desktops in VMware Horizon 7. In addition, the document provides information on how to implement and troubleshoot each graphics technology.
 

This VMware Horizon 7 Enterprise Edition reference architecture designs and validates a typical configuration for a two-data-center strategy. Most organizations need to provide a solution for disaster recovery and business continuity in case of site failure, with the least possible recovery time.


With services, applications, and data delivered by Horizon 7, organizations can provide continuity of service and mitigate against component failure, even in the case of a complete data center outage. This reference architecture describes availability and recovery services for a set of identified use cases, and can be easily adapted to general multi-site requirements.

Horizon 7 Enterprise Edition Multi-Site Reference Architecture

In this two-day course, you will focus on learning the tools and skills necessary to troubleshoot VMware vSAN 6.6 implementations. You will gain practical experience with vSAN troubleshooting concepts through the completion of instructor-led activities and hands-on challenge lab exercises.

By the end of the course, you should be able to meet the following objectives:

• Describe the software components
• Diagram how the components relate to each other
• Describe vSAN object placement
• Explain the differences between object states
• Explain how storage policies affect object states
• Predict how specific failures affect object states

The resxtop and esxtop command-line utilities provide a detailed look at how ESXi uses resources in real time. Also, esxtop displays information about the state of the physical server running an ESXi Server.

It lists CPU utilization for each physical processor, memory utilization, and disk and network bandwidth for each network and disk device available to the ESX Server machine. Furthermore, esxtop lists CPU and memory utilization for each individual VMkernel world.

Memory utilization is characterized by the type of memory (for example, shared, private, or swapped) that is being consumed. These CPU and memory statistics let you monitor the resource utilization for each of your virtual machines. 

You can use the Projects feature in vRealize Operations Manager to plan for capacity allocations and upgrades in your virtual environment, or to optimize your existing resources. To plan your upcoming capacity needs, you create a project that anticipates forthcoming changes that affect the capacity of your objects.

In addition to creating projects to plan for hardware changes or virtual infrastructure changes, you can create custom profiles and custom data centers to help forecast your capacity needs.

With custom profiles, you can determine how many instances of an object can fit in your environment depending on the available capacity and configuration. With custom data centers, you can see capacity analytics and badge computations based on the objects contained in the custom data center.

A project is a detailed estimation of the capacity that you must have available in your environment based on upcoming changes. You can define projects to add or remove resources from objects such as your vCenter Server instance, clusters, data centers, hosts, virtual machines, and datastores.

With projects, you plan for changes in capacity, and examine the possible outcomes. You can plan for increases or decreases in the demand for capacity on your objects.

Mastering VMware vSphere 6.5 written by Andrea Mauro, Paolo Valsecchi and Karel Novak is available to pre-order now and is expected to be published in February 2018.

Each object is composed of a set of components, determined by capabilities that are in use in the VM Storage Policy. For example, with Primary level of failures to tolerate set to 1, vSAN ensures that the protection components, such as replicas and witnesses, are placed on separate hosts in the vSAN cluster, where each replica is an object component. In addition, in the same policy, if the Number of disk stripes per object configured to two or more, vSAN also stripes the object across multiple capacity devices and each stripe is considered a component of the specified object. 

vSAN 6.0 and later maintains a quorum by using an asymmetrical voting system where each component might have more than one vote to decide the availability of objects. Greater than 50 percent of the votes that make up a VM’s storage object must be accessible at all times for the object to be considered available. When 50 percent or fewer votes are accessible to all hosts, the object is no longer accessible to the vSAN datastore. Inaccessible objects can impact the availability of the associated VM.

An object is considered unhealthy when no full mirror is available or the minimum required number of data segments are unavailable for RAID 5 or RAID 6 objects. If fewer than 50 percent of an object's votes are available, the object is unhealthy. Multiple failures in the cluster can cause objects to become unhealthy. When the operational status of an object is considered unhealthy, it impacts the availability of the associated VM.

If the stripe width is configured with 1, the number op replica components minus the stripe width is the number of witness components.

IF SW=1 THEN C-SW=W

The VMware vSphere 6.5 Host Resources Deep Dive is a guide to building consistent high-performing ESXi hosts. A book that people can’t put down. Written for administrators, architects, consultants, aspiring VCDX-es and people eager to learn more about the elements that control the behavior of CPU, memory, storage and network resources.

This book shows that we can fundamentally and materially improve the systems we’re building. We can make the currently running ones consistently faster by deeply understanding and optimizing our systems.

The reality is that specifics of the infrastructure matter. Details matter. Especially for distributed platforms which abstract resource layers, such as NSX and vSAN.

Knowing your systems inside and out is the only way to be sure you’ve properly handled those details. It’s about having a passion for these details. It’s about loving the systems we build. It’s about understanding them end-to-end.

Get your free copy here.

The VMware Horizon 7 Network Ports document lists port requirements for connectivity between the various components and servers in a Horizon 7 deployment. Included are detailed Horizon 7 Network Ports diagrams.

Links from the thumbnail diagrams take you to larger PDF layouts of the diagrams that are high resolution and ready for printing as posters. Each subset of the main diagram focuses on a particular connection type and display protocol use.

In the free VMware Integrated OpenStack Fundamentals course, you will learn how VMware supports the open-source and industry standard OpenStack framework for managing public and private clouds.

This course covers the features and advantages of VMware Integrated OpenStack. It also covers the basic architecture, explains how to deploy and manage cloud-based IaaS, demonstrates the unique advantages that VMware brings to OpenStack, and describes the new features available in the latest release, including container management built on Kubernetes.

This course is designed to be used with a hands-on lab, giving you the opportunity to use VMware Integrated OpenStack in a live deployment. While working through the hands-on labs is not a requirement for completing this course, the labs will provide a very clear and deep understanding of the advantages of VMware Integrated OpenStack.