Troy's IT Blog

I am going to start doing this every year to keep me accountable. I will also try to do a mid year and end of the year review. Start Blogging - This has been one of my goals for a long time now. I really want to give back and share my knowledge. Pass a new Certification Exam - Right now i am thinking about one of the VCAP-DTM exams or CCA-V (Citrix Certified Associate - Virtualization). Attend an Industry Conference - Right now my plan is to attend VMworld US and Citrix Synergy.  Cloud Technology - Learn more about AWS and VMware vCloud Air.  Automation - Work on building more automation for repeatable tasks.  Pick up a new Hobby - I really want to spend time playing and learning about drones.

This is one of the top issues I have seen when working with Horizon View. I think the hard thing with this is the fact that there is so many different things that can cause this issue. This also seems to be one of the hardest things for tier 1 staff to work with. I am going to try my best to provide a complete list of possible things that can cause this.  VMware Agents not being installed in the correct order. I am starting off with this one as it is one of the first things i check when i don't know the view environment i am working with. It is also a good thing to have in any VMware Horizon View health check. This is also a easy fix and can really help stabilize the Horizon View environment. VMware has a great KB 2118048 that includes all the details on what order agents must be installed in. Incorrect video driver version installed on the view virtual machine  This issue goes with the one listed above. If you install / upgrade the VMware Tools after view ...

When working with Citrix XenDesktop / XenApp 7.12 and newer. You might have a need for a reboot schedule within a delivery group that requires multiple reboot schedules. When you go to try to do this in the GUI of Citrix Studio there is no option to do multiple reboots schedules inside of a delivery group. Good news is there is a new command let that will let you do this in in XenDesktop / XenApp 7.12. I found this GUI tool to help make this process a little easier here http://wedelit.no/blog/2017/01/20/wedel-it-citrix-reboot-scheduler/ .  The way it works is based on TAGs that you set within a delivery group in Citrix Studio. A few requirements are needed to make this work • This tool must be run from a delivery controller running version 7.12 or later • Delivery groups must be defined in Citrix Studio • TAGs must be set in Citrix Studio

What is Liquidware Stratusphere Product: Is a physical and virtual desktop assessment, monitoring, and diagnostics solution. It is comprised of 2 solutions. Stratusphere FIT: Is an assessment tool that allows you to evaluate your existing environment on how resources are currently being consumed. Stratusphere UX: is a monitoring and diagnostic desktop solution that will provide you with desktop user experience. It will also provide data for the entire desktop infrastructure from endpoints, hosts, network, and storage. Planning Installation of Liquidware Stratusphere The Stratusphere product has 2 required components and 2 optional components. Required Components: Stratusphere Hub Appliance: Is the central management and reporting of the stratusphere platform. Connector ID Key: Is the software installed on each endpoint that collects metrics and sends it to the hub appliance. Optional Components: Stratusphere Database Appliance: Is used to store information wh...

VMware Horizon View 7 added a new security feature  that is enabled by default for RFC 6454 Origin Checking. This Security feature protects against cross-site request forging. What this feature does is when you go to the View Administrator page it will check the origin URL for the web request. When it does the check it will reject the request if the URL is not https://localhost/admin or https://URL_used_in_Secure_Tunnel_URL_Field/admin. Do keep in mind this feature was around in earlier versions but was disabled by default. The big impact I have seen from this is if you try go to Horizon view administrator web page in Google Chrome or Safari. When you use one of those browsers you will see a blank or incomplete site with text missing from buttons. Below is a example of what you will see. If you want the simple way out you can disable the feature by modifying the  locked.properties  file on each of your connection and security servers. If you do not want to ...

One thing that can really be a pain for your Horizon View users and support people is users that remove the VMXNET 3 network adapter. When a user does this they will be disconnected as the VM they they where using will not have a network card anymore. This is a configuration issue on your View Pool templates that can be fixed with not a lot of work. Keep in mind this fix is for View Pools that meet the following critria Must be a VM using the VMXNET 3 network adapter. Using linked Clones or Instant Clones for your  Horizon View Pools.  If you are using Full Clone desktop pools you will need to update the VM template as listed below but skip the snapshot steps. You will also need to update each full Clone VM that has already been created. For those of us that still love the old school C# vSphere Client follow the following steps to complete the fix. Start the vSphere Client and connect to your vCenter Server.  On your parent VM used for your Hori...

The Horizon View Portal Page is the main page when you go to your Horizon View Connection Server or VIP web address on your web browser. HTTPS:\\Connection Server or VIP There are a few reasons why you might want to make changes to the Horizon View Portal page. You can make the following changes to the Horizon View Portal Page: Hide the HTML Access Icon Hide the View Client Icon Set a custom URL for downloading the Horizon Client Set custom links to a specific Horizon Client Version. To Customize the portal page do the following: Log into one of your Horizon View Connection Servers and go to C:\ProgramData\VMware\VDM\portal\ and open Portal-links-html-access.properties in a text editor.  Set the configuration properties based on your desired configuration.  Options you can configure: Options Property Settings Disable HTML Access Enable.webclient=false If this option is set to false but the enable.download option i...