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.