VMware View Desktop plugin for vSphere Web Client
Today I installed the VMware View Desktops Plug-in on the vSphere Web Client. This plugin is a Technical Preview included with Horizon View 5.2. After installing this plugin you can use the vSphere Web Client to search for a View Desktop user and the Web Client will show the virtual desktop(s) that the user is logged on to. You can use this tool to troubleshoot issues that may arise with an end user’s virtual desktop. If a user calls in with a problem, you can immediately jump to the user’s VM and troubleshoot from there.
Installation
The installation is well described in the README.txt file which is located in the following path:
C:\<VIEW-installed-directory>\Server\TechPreview\ViewAdminPlugin
The View Desktops plug-in works with vSphere 5.1 and later versions only. Make sure system clocks are synchronized and valid SSL server certificates are issued with the correct hostnames on all servers.
Before you register the Plugin, VMware recommends to snapshot the vSphere SSO server system, vSphere Web Client system, and vCenter Server system. It’s called a Tech Preview, so when something goes terrible wrong, you can revert to snapshot.
First, you need to configure View to recognize the vCenter Lookup Service. You perform this configuration task once for all View Connection Server instances in a replicated group:
- Open a command prompt on View Connection Server to run the regtool.cmd utility.
- cd C:\<VIEW-installed-directory>\Server\TechPreview\ViewAdminPlugin
- (Optional) set JAVA_HOME to <jre-folder> (set JAVA_HOME=c:\Program Files\VMware\VMware View\Server\jre)
- Configure the Lookup Service: regtool.cmd configureLookupService -u @ -ld https://:7444/lookupservice/sdk
- If the command fails because the certificate is not trusted, accept the certificate thumbprint: regtool.cmd configureLookupService -u @ -ld https://:7444/lookupservice/sdk -lt
When you type the password, the following warning message might appear. You can ignore this message:
log4j: WARN No appenders could be found for logger <com.vmware.vim.vmomi.core.types.impl.VmodlContextImpl>. log4j: WARN Please initialize the log4j system properly
Next, you register the View Desktops plug-in. You need to perform these steps on every View Connection Server in a replicated group: … Continue Reading
VMware View upgrade path – not so easy…
A customer is using VMware View 4.5 on ESX 4.1 and wants to upgrade to View 5.1.1 with ESX 5.0 U1. If you take a look at the following interoperability matrix, the upgrade path is not so easy:
The first step is to upgrade the View components to View 4.6.1. the next step is to upgrade ESX to 4.1 U3. Then the View components can be upgraded to View 5.1.1 and the final step is to upgrade the vSphere components to 5.0 U1. With every upgrade step, you have to be careful which component of View you upgrade first. Take a look at the following compatibility matrix for View 5.1 and 5.0:
As you can see, some components are only compatible during the upgrade and some components are not compatible at all. And this is just the 5.1/5.0 matrix. Always doublecheck the versions you are currently running and don’t forget the View clients, which also need to be at a certain version, before you can upgrade.
Alternatively, a new View infrastructure can be build next to the old one. Then the current master image(s) can be copied to the new environment and upgrade the VMware tools and the View agent. Then point the users to the new environment.
As you can see, the latest vSphere version (5.1) is not supported with any version of View at the moment. When the next update of View (5.1.2? 5.2? 5.5?) supports vSphere 5.1, you will first need to upgrade the View components, and then the vSphere components. Updating VMware View is always fun 
Disappearing Virtual NIC & VMX has left the building
I know I’m not the first who noticed it, since this message is to be found in log files for years with ESX, but I still wanted to share this one:
Especially when you’re seriously troubleshooting an issue and this message appears, it’s a good laugh. Kudos to the VMware programmer with humour .
Back 2 Business: the missing/disappeared Virtual NIC
… Continue Reading
Project VRC: phase 3 – a must read!
Finally we’ve completed phase 3 of Project VRC. For the past months we’ve worked very hard and performed a lot of tests to compare VDI workloads and the results are very interesting, to say the least. If you’re interested in VDI, Windows 7 (on vSphere) and IOPS you really should read this whitepaper!
This whitepaper is focused on VDI; Windows XP and Windows 7 are extensively compared running on vSphere. For example; the I/O behavior of Windows XP and Windows 7 is investigated in detail. By evaluating the different phases of a desktop workload, completely new insights and best practices are given.
It’s great to see what kind of impact tweaking Windows and vSphere has on IOPS and number of users you can get on a VDI-host (which will lower the cost per desktop).
Also read the blogpost about the release of this VRC whitepaper.
vSphere 4.1 released, vMotion part of Standard edition.
VMware released vSphere 4.1 with a couple of new features like “Memory compression”, “Storage I/O Control” and much more. I’m not going to repeat all the information, because you can already read it here:
One thing that I don’t read is that vMotion is now part of vSphere Standard edition. And that’s a big improvement for a lot of organizations who don’t need all the features of Advanced or Enterprise (Plus), but do need vMotion for maintenance for example.
