VMware View - 9

This is a demo video of the $99.95 MicroClient TC. The MicroClient TC is a 300 Mhz ARM 9 based thin client that comes with the complete Quick RDP software that automatically boots into a Windows Terminal Session on a Windows 2003 or 2008 server. It can also be used with Windows XP hosted on a VMware server. Wouldn’t it be great if the VMware View Client is supported on this device?

Installing and configuring VMware Workstation, VMware ThinApp, and creating a ThinApp Packaged Application in a 20 minute video.

VMware ThinApp From Start to Finish in 20 Minutes - Part 2 of 2

During the delivery of my VMware View training I experienced a nasty error. It took me a while before I figured out what caused it. When you’re adding a vCenter server to the Connection server you have the option to enable the Composer. Before enabling the Composer you have to install the Composer software on the vCenter server. After activating the enable mark box, you must add a Domain administrator account. When I added an account, the following error showed up in the event log of the vCenter server.

Bad domain name. com.vmware.vdi.admin.ui.VCBean.a(SourceFile:1002)
AxisFault
faultCode: {http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/}Client
faultString: VMware.Sim.Fault.AdHostsUnavailableFault
{http://vmware.com/SviService}AdHostUnavailableFault:<AdConfigId i:nil="true"/>

After trying a lot of different things, I finally ended up with two solutions, the hard way is remove your vCenter server from the AD Domain and let it rejoin the AD Domain again. The easy way is add an AD Domain record to your DNS server. Quick and dirty, open your DNS manager, add an A record, don’t fill in the host name and just hit OK. After that, it works like a charm.

The past few weeks I’ve been trying to setup a VMware View lab. Time after time I received the same error. The Connection server reported, “Waiting for agent” in the Global desktop and pool view / Desktop Sources tab. This error was caused by the DHCP server running on my internet router.

Finally, after reading the install guide I decided to create a dedicated AD,DHCP and DNS server for the View desktops. VMware View has several requirements in the way Active Directory must be configured:

• An Active Directory integrated dynamic DNS
• A reverse lookup zone
• An integrated DHCP server
• All virtual desktops must be members of the domain.
• The VDM Connection Server must be a member of the domain.

I created an internal only switch and connected the Connection server, the VDI Desktops and the one virtual NIC of the vCenter server. The error disappeared and I’m able to log on to my virtual desktops. 

Lessons learned:

• VMware View requires Active Directory.
• Best practice: Assign a separate domain (or at least a separate OU) for a VDM environment.
• Best practice: Install your domain controller / DNS server / DHCP server inside a virtual machine.
• Configure DNS with a reverse lookup zone.
• Configure DHCP to automatically register computers and PTR records.

View Manager 3.0.1 includes the following enhancements:

• Integrates the ThinPrint Virtual Channel Gateway module so that View deployments can communicate with ThinPrint server. Important: ThinPrint's .print engine for VMware View must be installed on the target print server prior to installing View 3.0.1. Print jobs originating from virtual machines are subject to different licensing criteria on ThinPrint server. In order to provide the print server with information about the origin of a print request, View uses the TPVCGateway module as the print provider.

Continue reading "What's New in View Manager 3.0.1 " »

Belgian/Dutch reference case showing the unique benefits of a virtual desktop (VMware View) combined with the special Ultra Thinclients from SUN Microsystems.

Login Consultants released the new beta of the free Login Virtual Session Indexer, the free platform independent benchmark suite for VDI and SBC environments. The new beta (0.5) introduces many unique and important features for benchmarking virtual desktop and SBC environments. The most important new features are:

• True platform independence (both VDI & SBC) through a powerful custom command line option within the launcher, this includes the possibility to use a CSV file with advanced connection details for each individual session;
• Randomization of user data within each user load loop, this is the most important new feature of this beta as now optimizers (either at a memory or network level) cannot optimize/cache/compress/de-duplicate in an unrealistic fashion;
• Simplified and centralized configuration of the Launcher(s) and setting-up multiple launchers (master-slaves) for large scale tests is now more straightforward;
• The installation and configuration of the target platform is now 99% automated (only Office requires a manual default installation);
• The scripted user workload is now a more realistic loop of 15 minutes (previous beta was 6 minutes). It is now also more dynamic and includes a printing to PDF.
• Many bug fixes and more robust user workload scripting suited for extreme system loads and improved platform support.

It is still 100% freeware, off course! :-) As usual, Login VSI Beta 0.5 (286 MB) can be freely obtained from the download section on www.loginvsi.com after registration.

Openfiler converts an industry standard x86/64 architecture system into a full-fledged NAS/SAN appliance or IP storage gateway and provides storage administrators with a powerful tool to cope with burgeoning storage needs. Building upon the popularity of server virtualization technologies such as VMware, Virtual Iron, and Xen, Openfiler can also be deployed as a virtual machine instance.

This deployment flexibility of Openfiler ensures that storage administrators are able to make the best use of system performance and storage capacity resources when allocating and managing networked storage in a multi-platform environment.

Openfiler addresses all the key data storage concerns

Reliability - Openfiler supports both software and hardware RAID with monitoring and alert facilities; volume snapshot and recovery.
Availability - Openfiler supports active/passive high availability clustering, MPIO, and block level replication.
Performance - Linux 2.6 kernel supports the latest CPU, networking and storage hardware.
Scalability - filesystem scalability to 60TB+, online filesystem and volume growth support.

What's new in Openfiler 2.3

Per-network NFS.
Tuning Enhanced CIFS Options.
Multiple NIC Bonding.
Advanced iSCSI Setup.
Fine-tune NFS client access; set wdelay,sync, origin port etc.
Advanced CIFS share configuration enables enhanced application compatibility.
Create multiple bonded NIC configurations to improve performance.
Create multiple iSCSI targets and map LUNs and snapshots.

VMware released an update of the their VDI connection broker software with some exiting improvements and features like :

  Pools spanning datastores in order to better manage resources
 Localization of VDM Web Access and Client for Windows
 Command line parameters for VDM Client
 Integrate MMR multimedia extensions DLL with VDM Client (Windows XP)
 Allow end users to change password
 Multiple sessions per user within a pool
 Improvements to logging
 Allow end users to restart their VM
 Defined process for bulk import of individual desktops
 VDM Configuration Backup (command-line only)
 Allow blocking of incoming RDP connections that are not from VDM Clients
 Allow VDM administrators to set default desktop (command line only)

VMware Introduces Several New Professional Services Offerings for Virtual Desktop Implementations. This offering contains a new suite of professional services that help IT departments implement, manage, and optimize virtual desktops. Using proven best practices based on VMware Infrastructure methodology, customers and partners gain valuable insight on how to increase employee productivity, reduce IT costs, and improve security in their desktop computing environments.