Troy's IT Blog

So you want to build a home lab for testing or to help study for a exam but you don't have a large budget to do this. You are in luck with the use of VMware Workstation you can create a nested vSphere lab on a single piece of hardware even a laptop so you can take your lab with you. Below I am going to cover what is needed to create this lab and how to build the basic items required to have your lab up and working. This will be broken into 8 steps to complete the lab setup process. Step 1) What is needed to build your vSphere lab on VMware Workstation This section will cover everything you need to have ready to get started with your home lab including hardware and software.  Step 2) Plan and design your vSphere lab networking in VMware Workstation This section will cover how to setup the networking inside of VMware Workstation to allow the lab to communicate. Step 3) Plan and create a windows template in VMware Workstation This is part of making this lab a l

Today I am going to talk about the design decision on how to manager your user profiles on VDIs. This topic has been evolving over the years as technology has made new solutions possible. The important thing to point out is out of all the solutions none of them are bad. It just depends on the use case you are working with as to what is the best fit. Below you will find 6 profile solutions and details about when to use each. Don't Use Any Solution - With this solution you chose to not do anything with the profiles. This means if you are running a non-persistent VDI when the VDI is refreshed all user data will be deleted. This has no real impact in a full persistent VDI environment. Recommended use case: Full Persistent VDI or Non-persistent VDI where you do not care if you do not retain user data. Horizon Persistent Disks - With this solution you redirect the user profile to a 2nd hard drive on the VDI. This allows you to be able to refresh the C drive of the VD

With the recent release of VMware Horizon 7.5 a new feature was added to the product. This Feature is called JMP Integrated Workflow. JMP is a marketing term used by VMware to mean Just-in-Time Management Platform and really this is just a combination of 3 products inside of VMware Horizon Enterprise. The 3 products are Instant Clones, App Volumes, and User Environment Manager. With the introduction of the workflow in Horizon 7.5 it adds a new HTML5 console for user centric management. This is VMware's solution to bringing all the solutions under a single console to define what the users workspace will be and automate the creation of that workspace. Recently VMware created a Quick Start Guide for using this new console if you are using the 3 products i listed above or are looking into using them i would highly recommend giving this guide a look over.

As the title states you are wanting to run the new Windows 10 build 1709 in your VMware Horizon environment but are still running View 6.x. I got some good news for you VMware Horizon View 6.2.6 released on March 29th now supports 1709. I would like to point out if you can start looking to move to Horizon View 7.x as 6.x is end of general support on 06/19/2019. You can find find more information in the release notes listed here and you can download View 6.2.6 here .

VMware Release Notes Release Notes What's New? The latest release of App Volumes includes many enhancements that improve end user login times, security, Microsoft Office support, and Windows 10 support. Performance improvements for faster user login and application launch Optimized handling of application registry hives by not blocking end-user login. Addressed a bug that caused the App Volumes agent to scan Appstacks and Writable Volumes before the Windows explorer shell is available. Integration with Active Directory You can manage application and writable volumes assignments across multiple Active Directory domains and forests. You can add multiple domain controllers that App Volumes Manager leverages to query Active Directory users, computers, groups, and OUs. You can move and retain application and writable volumes assignments even when Active Directory objects are moved out of an OU or Group. Security Enhancements By default, communication between App

Today i am going to talk about how to setup the VMware Horizon View GPO templates. Using the VMware Horizon View GPO templates you can add value to your overall Horizon View Solution.  Prerequisites: Create GPOs for the different Horizon 7 components and link them to the OU that contains each Horizon 7 components. Ensure you have a user account that has rights to modify GPOs. Ensure you have the Group Policy Management snap-in MMC installed.  Download the Horizon 7 GPO bundle from VMware download site here . This will be found under the VMware Horizon download. Setup: unzip the GPO bundle you downloaded above it should have a name like VMware-Horizon-Extras-Bundle-x.x.x-yyyyyyy.zip This next step you have two options Option 1: Copy the ADMX and ADML files from the GPO bundle to the GPO central store. I am not going to go into details on how to configure a GPO central store as that is out of scope for this blog post. Option 2: Copy the ADMX and ADML files to the l

When setting up the Unified Access Gateway (UAG) for the first time you might run into network issues or trying to prove to your network team that a port is not open. The options you have when doing this troubleshooting include 5 tools (Ping, nslookup, tracepath, curl, and tcpdump) from the UAG console interface. Another tool that might help is wireshark to run on your connection servers or VDI desktops. Using nslookup to check DNS: First make sure that DNS is working by using nslookup command from the UAG console. This should be tested on the following items. Connection Server FQDN Load Balanced VIP for Internal Connection servers Should also check that your External URL can be resolved on public DNS. Using Ping to troubleshoot UAG network issues: Next check basic network connectivity with ping by running the ping command from the UAG console. This should be tested for the following items. Ping each internal connection server Ping the load balanced VIP for Internal

VMware just made Horizon View and  Skype for Business solution a more complete feeling with the latest release of Horizon View 7.4 release. This is done with the Horizon Virtualization Pack for Skype for Business. The reason why I like this solution so much is the fact that it can enable Horizon View users both on the desktop and RDSH the ability to leverage features that would with out the Virtualization pack have a high resource impact.It does this by optimally delivering audio and video either directly between end-points for one-on-one collaboration, or offloaded to a central Multi-point Control Unit (MCU) for multi-party conference calls or meetings. So what is new with Horizon 7.4 that list can be found below but i think the support for Mac clients is a really big one as this now gets the solution to have support on Windows, Mac, and Linux clients. This allows more users to be able to have device choice and not lose out on this great feature. Support for Horizon 7 Mac Client: