Ever since VMware started selling View as a desktop solution, we’ve had these discussions with colleagues and customers. You probably are familiar with the topic:

Many companies have more than one location, but they all want to manage their IT infrastructure as if it was one. So, if we can throw in a big data-line between those locations with low latency, highly resilient, including rapid fail-over and so on.. can we create one big View desktop pool for all our users spanning all our locations?

The answer is: No you cannot!

“But the bandwidth is 10 Gbps and the latency is very low!”

It doesn’t matter, you still cannot.

“Why??”

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It is a common misunderstanding that, if you buy software licenses you can do anything with it. You will not become the owner of it, you only get the use right of the software under STRICT CONDITIONS. What you may or may not do with Microsoft software is recorded to the smallest details by Microsoft in several documents, like the End User License Agreement (e.g. Enterprise Agreement), Product Lists and Product Use Rights.

Only a few people read all those documents, but in general nobody reads them all. They just buy the licenses and think are correct or are offered by their IT supplier. Always check with a license expert that what you want to achieve complies with what is possible with the licenses you want to acquire. This prevents disappointment and high costs later on.

I wrote a post on licensing Windows 7 in a VMware Horizon View environment and most things mentioned in that post are still valid also for Windows 8. Below I will zoom into changes or summarize important facts for a complete understanding.

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In my previous article I wrote about a VDI optimization script from Microsoft for Windows 8 and Windows 7. This article focuses on the features and services you could disable or adjust to increase the performance of your VDI desktops. There are a lot of changes that can be made and you might want to decide which change you do or do not use within your own infrastructure. Running the script in it’s default form could very well not be the way that you want it to be.

In this article I will try to explain the script in such a way that you should be able to read it and take out the parts that you want to use. Maybe after looking at the script you decide that you don’t want to use the script in itself, but it at least will show you where you can make the changes and choose your own way of applying it. So lets get started…

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In the summer of 2010 Erik wrote an article about “How to: Optimize guests for VMware View” in which he describes all sorts of changes he makes for a Windows XP or Windows 7 virtual desktop in a VDI environment. The changes that are suggested in the article are still valid, but after reading them I was wondering if there are new additions, specifically with Windows 8 now on the market. During my search I quickly came across a Visual Basic script that was released by Microsoft on their Technet site for optimization of a Windows 8 virtual desktop.

At the beginning of the script there is a disclaimer that you should have knowledge of the vb scripting language and that you should proceed with caution. Since the script is fairly long and a lot of changes are being made I decided to break the script down and put this in a table to give an overview of the services and settings being changed. As the title of the article indicates this is part 1 of the article, in part 2 I will try to explain the different pieces of the script in such a way that more people might understand what is happening inside the script.

While putting everything into a table I also looked if these changes could be made for a Windows 7 desktop too. The table is divided in several parts (and one bullet list) to provide some more overview to the whole.

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At VMGuru.nl we’ve done a lot of articles on VDI performance and best practices. Recently I’ve done an article on ‘How to improve VMware View video performance‘ and Edwin did an article on ‘Boosting Google maps and video with VMware View‘.

Researching the possibilities and changes with Horizon View 5.2, Eric Sloof pointed me to two new technical white papers.

VMware recently released two white papers, one on the performance and best practices for the new VMware Horizon View 5.2 and the second on the use of hardware accelerated 3D graphics with VMware Horizon View 5.2.

This is must read material for everyone who’s designing, planning and installing a VMware Horizon View 5.2 VDI environment.

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Yesterday I was busy trying some things in my VMware Horizon View 5.2 environment and after a while I got tired of repeating the same tasks on different desktop pools over and over again. Looking for a way to make things easier I came across the View Pool Manager which is a VMware Fling that allows VMware Horizon View administrators to easily manage multiple desktop pools at the same time.

With this tool VMware solves one of the biggest challenges a VMware View administrators faces in large deployments is desktop pool maintenance. Commonly each desktop pool has an Active Directory security group entitlement with the number of users a given desktop pool will support. As employees leave/join the organization, security groups require maintenance to ensure the number of users in each group correctly match the amount of desktops available. VMware View Pool Manager allows VMware View administrators to easily manage users across desktop pools and security groups for large deployments.

This tool allow administrators to bind an Active Directory connection and specify:

• How many users there should exist per group (based on VMware View pool size);
• Floating or Persistent deployment;
• Source Security Groups (all users to be distributed to pools);
• Destination Security Groups (All groups the users may be assigned to).

The View Pool Manager requires .NET Framework 4.0. The .NET 3.5 SP1 installation might require Internet connectivity to download more files. Verify that you are a member of the Administrators group on on the domain.

I tried this tool in my test environment and it’s a great help. It really saved me a lot of time in a small environment, so in a large VMware Horizon View deployment this tool should help the View administrators to save hours of work adding, removing and maintaining users, desktop pools and security groups.

The View Pool Manager is a development from Andre Leibovici (myvirtualcloud.net).

I really like it, so when you have a View environment and need a lot of time maintaining it, give it a try!

Download View Pool Manager.

During a performance optimizing session this week, with a customer, we found some interesting things to boost specific parts of the environment. While playing a high resolution video with clipping where the whole screen turns black and shows a new screen a split second later.

When we started, we saw the video bump and freeze from time to time. Also we experienced ghost lines on the middle of the screen, where the upper part of the screen moved first while the bottom part tried to keep up. We used the Fast & Furious 6 Official Trailer in an 1080p format for testing. The the business news running in an embedded Windows media player on Internet Explorer 9 didn’t perform well either.

The vDesktop is a Windows 7 Enterprise desktop with 2GB memory and 2 vCPU so it can play native 720p videos when necessary as Erik mentioned in his post. We are running the VMware View environment on an Imtech built Flexpod with NetApp storage, Cisco UCS computing power and Cisco Nexus switching for VMware vSphere and VMware View 5.

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For years VMware has been busy creating a range of Horizon-like products. At VMworld 2009 there was already a preview of what the folks in Palo Alto were working on.
Since then a lot has changed, AppBlast was shown, Octopus came (and went again).

30 minutes ago VMware finally launched their new range of end user computing products called the VMware Horizon Suite.

So, what does Horizon consist of? Well, actually Horizon is the new name for the collection of ALL End User Computing (EUC) products VMware has to offer, some of which you already know and love, like VMware View and ThinApp. But now the new cool products are finally here!

So, what is VMware Horizon Suite? It consists of these products:

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This week Teradici, creator of the PCoIP protocol, released a technology preview of their new product named Teradici Arch. Teradici Arch is asoftware-based solution that enables the use of the PCoIP protocol for Microsoft  RDS as an alternative to Microsoft RDP.

This should provide better user experience and access to the entire PCoIP ecosystem, PCoIP thin clients, APEX accelerator cards, etc.

Teradici has been forced to delay the release of Arch due to a scalability issue but a new tech preview will still allow enterprises to familiarize themselves with the product. The final product release is expected in Q3 2013.

This solution should be an ideal solution for enterprises with mixed environment of VMware View VDI and Microsoft RDS. I wonder how many of these mixed environments exist. The only mixed PCoIP/RDP environments I have seen in my work are View environments where both protocols are used to connect to the same View desktops to use MMR instead of PCoIP acceleration.

The PCoIP protocol is now available for use with terminal services for more performance over any network type and access to the PCoIP ecosystem of products including low maintenance, ultra-secure zero clients. Teradici Arch enables customers to:

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During the last weeks we’ve been busy implementing a large VMware View deployment for one customer and planning an even larger VMware View deployment for another customer. At the first site we ran into some video performance issues which we definitely want to avoid during the second project.

In our quest to solve and avoid the video performance issues we ran into a number of ways to improve the video performance in VMware View that I would like to share.

First of all, we used the information below from the VMware Architecture Planning Guide:

480p-formatted video You can play video at 480p or lower at native resolutions when the View desktop has a single virtual CPU. If the operating system is Windows 7 and you want to play the video in high-definition Flash or in full screen mode, the desktop requires a dual virtual CPU.

720p-formatted video You can play video at 720p at native resolutions if the View desktop has a dual virtual CPU. Performance might be affected if you play videos at 720p in high definition or in full screen mode.

1080p-formatted video If the View desktop has a dual virtual CPU, you can play 1080p formatted video, although the media player might need to be adjusted to a smaller window size.

3D If you plan to use 3D applications such as Windows Aero themes or Google Earth, the Windows 7 View desktop must have virtual hardware version 8 and turn on the pool setting called Windows 7 3D Rendering. Up to 2 monitors are supported, and the maximum screen resolution is 1920 x 1200. This non-hardware accelerated graphics feature enables you to run DirectX 9 and OpenGL 2.1 applications without requiring a physical graphics processing unit.

These are the settings we used to size the first solution, so we use a Windows 7 desktop image with dual vCPU, 2GB memory, a VMXNET3 adapter and hardware version 8.

This is good for playing 720p in native video resolution but when scaling to full screen this setup does not run smoothly.

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As a vExpert, we have a special place with VMware. Not just socially, but really, in the community pages. Usually this place is filled with news about new stuff coming out, reviews about software, technical questions, opinions and so on. A few months ago Mike Laverick, one of the valued members and a vExpert, posted a request to help him with the review of a book he and Barry Coombs were writing. There were no financial benefits, just a helping hand for charity.

So, I jumped on the bandwagon and a few weeks later I received my chapter to review in the mail. It was a very fine piece of work. And now the good news is, you can read it too! Not just one chapter, mind you. The whole book is finished and ready to download!

It’s all about building a desktop on VDI with VMware View. It’s all new and up to date and gets you up and running quickly as it is written by people who do this for a living all day, not just another theoretical dude. It’s a must-read if you plan to go the VDI way.

Now, why is this different, you say? Well, the digital version of the book is for sale for only 12,72 Euros at LuLu but that isn’t the best part. The best part is, you’ll be supporting Unicef when you buy it! The printed version will follow soon after, but as this is hot from the (virtual) press today, we didn’t want you to miss out on this brand new book.

When deploying a VDI solution it is important to deliver PC like experience. Another requirement is delivering PC-grade applications on the VDI desktop. This is possible for the majority of office applications but applications that require (near) real-time two way audio and/or video, like Unified Communication solutions, remain a challenge.

The cause of this is the need to encode and decode voice and video. It isn’t feasible at scale to carry raw voice/video data from the endpoint to the datacenter to be encoded, or to decode it all there and send the video/audio data to the endpoint.

That is why development of Unified Communication solutions like Microsoft Lync are important to VDI vendors who need to continually reassure IT and end-users that the user experience will be the same as if they were working in a traditional personal computer.

Today, VMware announced that VMware is working with Microsoft to bring support for Microsoft Lync to VMware View desktops. The combination of VDI with Unified Communications leads to increased productivity, mobility and flexibility for employees, customers and partners alike. Soon, VMware View users will be able to communicate and collaborate with the Lync 2013 client, using rich voice and video features, all from within the VMware View desktop.

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VMware is rapidly expanding the possibilities of their new management suite VMware vCenter Operations Manager (vCops) with their recent release of VMware vCenter Operations Manager for View. This new addition provides end-to-end visibility into the health, performance and efficiency of a VMware View virtual desktop infrastructure. With this new tool desktop administrators can proactively ensure the best end-user experience, avert incidents and eliminate bottlenecks.

VMware vCenter Operations Manager for View really simplifies the deployment and management of a VMware View infrastructure. Admins can do end-to-end performance monitoring of entire virtual infrastructure, perform user-specific infrastructure analysis and track the  health of various components in a view deployment.

The cool thing is, VMware vCenter Operations Manager for View automatically learns normal operating parameters for View infrastructure and user workloads. This means the thresholds are not based on some default parameter from a configuration or best practices guide. Instead it knows when your infrastructure is acting normal or is in trouble by constantly monitoring and evaluating the behavior of your environment.

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VMware announced today that VMware View 5.1 will be available Q2 2012. Several new features and benefits will be included, like a good security enhancement to add two-factor authentication through Radius integration. Also the whole rewritten USB implementation rocks.

VMware View 5.1 Features and Benefits:
Enhancements and new features in VMware View 5.1 include:

• RADIUS Support – Support in VMware View 5.1 for RADIUS will enable greater choice for organizations looking to deploy two-factor authentication, while maintaining compatibility with existing choices.

• VMware View Media Services Enhancements: VMware View 5.1 Local Mode will add multi-monitor support and expanded USB device compatibility, improving the user experience by enabling more peripherals to connect seamlessly into VMware View virtual desktops.

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Today VMware released the new version of their View Client for the iPad. The VMware View Client for iPad is the first iPad client with support for the PCoIP for tight integration with VMware View and increased flexibility for the end-user.

This client enables end-users to connect to their VMware View desktop from an iPad with the best possible user experience on LAN or across a WAN. For full support with this new VMware View client version 1.4, VMware View 4.6.1 or later is recommended.

Other improvements are:

• Improved connection times to View server
• Improved support for external monitors
• Bug fixes

Today Teradici announced the availability of their long awaited Server Offload Card, the Teradici APEX 2800.

VDI implementations are typically constrained by the servers’ CPUs. The many tasks a CPU performs, together with PCoIP® protocol image encoding, limits the number of virtual machines that can run on any one server.

The APEX 2800 card offloads graphics processing from the server CPU which can reduce server CPU utilization by up to 50%, freeing up valuable CPU cycles which can be used to support even more virtual machines, allow existing virtual machines to run more intensive applications, or simply to provide more headroom to your VDI implementation. With 2GB of on-board memory, each Server Offload Card can support up to 64 displays at a resolution of 1920×1200.

The Teradici APEX2800 delivers an even better PCoIP user experience and improves the number of VDI sessions per server. Because of the offloading to the APEX2800 you can deliver a more reliable and consistent level of experience regardless of the overall demand on server CPUs. The APEX 2800 works seamlessly with VMware View (4.6, 5.0 or later).

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Today VMware’s partner Teradici announced a significant new releases from their PCoIP zero client and host card firmware and the PCoIP Management Console.

The following releases are now available for download on the Teradici support site (techsupport.teradici.com):

• Firmware 3.5.0 for PCoIP Zero Clients and PCoIP Host Cards.
• PCoIP Management Console 1.7.0

The new firmware update includes the following enhancements:

• USB2.0 with VMware View sessions
• Imprivata OneSign Virtual Desktop Access via proximity cards with VMware View
• IEEE 802.1x network security
• IPv6 support.

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