Belgium VMUG and VMware View Troubleshooting
Friday June 1st 2012 was the day of the 17th Belgium VMUG, a special bloggers edition. It was a great day, full of interesting sessions:
- RAID types and alignment impact on VMware workloads – Erik Zandboer
- Workshop “Designing a cloud infrastructure” – Duncan Epping & Lieven D’Hoore
- “Beer and PowerCLI: you can’t live without them” – Luc Dekens
- “HyperV v3.0 vs VMware vSphere 5” – Alex Muetstege & Erik Scholten (VMGuru)
- “Troubleshooting VDI” – Sven Huisman
- “VMware Health Check” – Gabrie van Zanten
- “Busting a few myths” – Eric Sloof
- “Mobile devices and Cloud. Bring ‘em on” – Albert Kramer (Trend Micro)
- “VCE” – Cisco, EMC & Trend Micro
- “Storage DRS” – Frank Denneman
- “Unleash the IAAS Cloud: About VMware vCloud Director and more…”” – Viktor van den Berg
- “vCenter Orchestrator” – Arnim Van Lieshout
I was honored to be invited to this event to speak about VMware View troubleshooting. As I had only 30 minutes, I didn’t do a deep dive session, but more of an overview of the VMware View components, what kind of problems you might run in to and a little bit deep diving troubleshooting the display quality using the PCoIP Logviewer. It was my first time I presented in English and also the first time I used Prezi. But I think I did ok 
.
Now that I think about it, in a lot of sessions, free tools were mentioned which you can use in your day-to-day work as an virtualization administrator. For example tools to align your disks (uberalign), to automate tasks (PowerCLI), to troublshoot PCoIP (PCoIP Logviewer) or to automate workflows (vCenter Orchestrator, comes with vCenter). And there was also free beer! In fact, the entire event was for free!
As a special surprise, Veeam told us what is coming next monday. I can’t tell you what it is yet, but I will update this post as soon as I am allowed to (maybe it has to do with something I mentioned earlier in this blogpost?!?).
Update: Veeam announced VeeamZIP at the Belgium VMUG, a Veeam Backup Free Edition.
If you did not attend this Belgium VMUG event, I can really recommend to attend next time, because there were a lot of great sessions, great content, good conversations, it’s free, you can win prizes and there was Belgium beer!
Thanks to Erik Schils for organizing this VMUG event and also thanks to Cisco Belgium for providing the location and a great tour in the Cisco Lab environment.
VMware View 5.1 new features highlighted
Today VMware announced VMware View 5.1. A lot of great new features in this update. In this blogpost I was going to highlight the new features of this release but that has already been done a lot by other bloggers. Instead, I will highlight a couple of the new features and dive a little deeper. First of all, if you haven’t read about the new features, here are a couple of links where you can read all about them:
- VMware EUC blog: What’s New in VMware View 5.1
- VMware View 5.1 press media backgrounder
- VMware View, optimizing storage with View storage accelerator
- VMware View, demystifying VMware View Large Scale Designs
- NTPRO.NL: VMware View 5.1 announcement
- VMware EUC Portfolio: View Composer Array Integration Tech Preview
Reading these posts will get you up to speed. General availability of VMware View 5.1 will be in Q2 of 2012.
Here are the things to keep in mind when implementing or upgrading to VMware View 5.1:
Free tools for VMware View
In these days of recession I thought it would be a good idea to sum up a couple of free tools which you can use designing, implementing and maintaining a VMware View Infrastructure. I’ve divided the tools in the following categories:
- Assessment
- Sizing
- Load balancing
- Optimizing
- User Environment Management
- Customization
- Client
- Monitoring
- Troubleshooting
I would love to hear if you know of any free tools which can be used in or for a VMware View Infrastructure.
Free Load balancing for VMware View with Citrix Netscaler VPX Express
A load balancer for VMware View is not a requirement in a VMware View infrastructure with less than 2000 users. Even when there are multiple VMware View Connection servers for high availability, a single VMware View Connection server can handle up to 2000 connections so it’s not a big deal that the sessions are not evenly balanced. You do however want to have multiple VMware View Connection servers for high availability and to be able to access multiple VMware View Connection servers from a single point of access. A load balancer provides that functionality but is often expensive and gives additional functionality not needed for smaller deployments, like SSL Offloading. There is however a free “Enterprise-ready” load balancer available from Citrix: Netscaler VPX Express. There is a 5 Mbit throughput limit, but that is not an issue and in this article I explain why.
DISCALAIMER: I’m not a netscaler or “load-balancing” expert nor am I a networking guru. I’ve researched and tested the described solution and it works. I’ve not tested this solution with a large amount of users (yet). If you think information in this article is incorrect or if you think you know a better configuration or solution, please let me know.
VMware View Local Mode – Lessons learned
I’ve been working with VMware View Local Mode for couple of weeks now and I wanted to share my experience. VMware View Local Mode allows a virtual desktop to be downloaded to a laptop or desktop and to be executed locally. The CPU, memory, disk, network and graphics from the local desktop is being used to execute the virtual desktop. No remote display protocol is being used. VMware View Local mode is also part of the Client Side Desktop Virtualization (CSDV) Smackdown, a whitepaper which explains what CSDV is, when to use it and what the possibilities are. This whitepaper will be comparable to the VDI smackdown, only this time it will not be about server-hosted desktop virtualization, but client-hosted desktop virtualization. This whitepaper is expected to be released in Q1 of 2012. In this blogpost I will share my experience with VMware View Local mode, how it works and what doesn’t work.
How it works
The benefits of using VMware View Local Mode:
“With View Client with Local Mode, users can check out and download a View desktop to a local system such as a laptop. Administrators can manage these local View desktops by setting policies for the frequency of backups and contact with the server, access to USB devices, and permission to check in desktops.”
I assume you have a basic knowledge of the VMware View architecture. If not, here is a basic overview:
