Troy's IT Blog

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.

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 ...

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...

If anyone has been working with Horizon View for a long time you will remember that prior to Horizon View version 7.0.2 you had to run powershell commands for Horizon View on the local connection server or use powershell remoting. Now with Horizon 7.0.2 and newer you can run powershell commands using PowerCLI from a remote system. In this blog I will go over the requirements needed, how to get started, examples, and some resources that you can use to expand what is covered here. What is PowerCLI: PowerCLI is a powerful command-line tool based on Windows PowerShell that lets you automate all aspects of vSphere vSAN, SRM, VROPS, vCloud, and Horizon View. within PowerCLI is 100's of cmdlets to be used to create the automation. VMware PowerCLI - Horizon Module allows for integrated powershell support for Horizon View and is shipped as a module with the PowerCLI product. This allows access to the full Horizon View public API and supports remote connections from workstations or serv...

I have been working to build a test VDI environment for windows 10 and been working with login times. I found this really nice blog series by Sven Huisman that can be found here . If you have been working windows 10 login times I recommend checking this out.

So you might be building a new environment or you might be doing a hardware refresh for your VDI. If this is the case you have three options one being Traditional Infrastructure, Converged Infrastructure, or Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI). In this post i am going to focus on HCI and why it is such a great option for VDI. What is Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI): HCI is a type of infrastructure system with a software-centric architecture that is comprised of the following building blocks compute, storage, networking and virtualization resources in a commodity hardware box supported by a single vendor. HCI Systems are managed as a single system using a common tool set. Advantages of Hyper-Converged Infrastructures: Simplified management: a HCI helps unifies management into a single interface. This  can allow the rest of your IT team to focus on proactive parts of the business. Reduced costs and increased efficiency:  With HCI lower costs of pur...

On February 7, 2017 VMware Announced VMware Horizon 7.1 with this update came a lot of great improvements to the Horizon View platform. Below i am going to cover the top items that have been new or improvments in this relese. Just-in-time Management Platform (JMP):  The following three VMware technologies is how we get to the Just-In-Time Management Platform. Instant Clones for ultra-fast desktop provisioning App Volumes for real-time app delivery User Environment Manager for contextual policy management. As I am sure you all know all three of the above technologies where part of the last release of Horizon. So what is so new? That is now not only virtual desktops but also published applications for both on premises and in the cloud can take advantage of JMP. To see this in action VMware has posted this quick video showing published applications with JMP Instant Clone update: As you may know or may not if you are running instant clones today you cant ...

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 ...

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...