VMGuru.nl – I choose (a virtual) life!

VMware has given out a VMware Alert for customers who are using VMware View in combination with PCoIP and ESX 4.0 to NOT update with ESX Update 2 yet.

After upgrading ESX 4.0 hosts with Update 2 VMware View clients are unable to connect to the virtual desktops. VMware is currently investigating a workaround for customers that have installed ESX 4.0 Update 2 and are affected see for more information and update the following KB Article: KB Link

This Knowledge Base article will be updated as new information becomes available. If you have been affected by this, please read the KB.

Symptoms are:

• Connections to virtual desktops using PCoIP fail
• You are no longer able to connect to virtual desktops using PCoIP
• You have recently updated VMware Tools

For example, you have installed ESX 4.0 Update 2, which updates VMware Tools, and you are no longer able to connect to virtual desktops using PCoIP.

Now that the new version of VMware View is coming shortly I was investigating the new possibilities with our thin client providers. Wyse Technology which has a nice solution already for the View 3.1 platform now has a new Zero Client which is specially made for View 4.0.

What makes this Zero Client so special? This model support PCoIP. PCoIP is the answer from VMware to make a great user experience possible with VMware View. VMware partnered with Teradici to introduce the PCoIP technology into View.  The P20 not only uses the software implementation but the P20 also contains the hardware chip that Teradici uses in the PCI Card solution. Tested by Brain Madden a couple of month ago.  Also see this article at BrianMadden . Imagine the possibilities this solution can offer in your VDI environment.

When the Wyse P20 comes to EMEA is not yet clear, but I hope to find out more next month. We at VMGuru.nl will also try to get our hands on a P20 model so we can blog our experiences.

More info on:  http://www.wyse.com/products/hardware/zeroclients/P20/index.asp

User profiles are a pain in the *. All to often profiles get corrupted by multiple sessions and logons are often slow.
RTO has a product for this: Virtual Profiles. This product solves a lot of problems with user profiles.

If you are going to use virtual desktops you will eventually end up with the same problem Terminal Server and Citrix users have had for a long time. But don’t worry, there is hope on the horizon:

AN FRANCISCO, Calif. – September 2, 2009 – Today at VMworld 2009, VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop through the datacenter and to the cloud, announced it has signed an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) agreement with RTO Software to integrate its industry-leading Virtual Profiles technology with VMware View™, the industry-leading enterprise desktop virtualization solution. The integrated offering will provide comprehensive user personality management and will enable VMware View customers to dynamically provision users, together with their profile, applications and data, across networks and devices. (See related press release also announced today: “VMware Leads in Virtual Desktops with VMware View™ – Simplifying Desktop Management, Lowering Costs and Enriching User Experience.”)

Moments after Erik posted about vCenter vs VDI,  I got problems with the VMware View 3.1.1 environment I’m setting up. I wanted to adjust the quality settings of Adobe Flash in a certain desktop pool. I started to edit the settings for the desktop pool and when I clicked finish I got a error that the Virtual Center didn’t had Sysprep running!!!

So I change a settings about the quality for Adobe Flash and suddenly Sysprep is broken?

The suggestion made to resolving this error was to set the customization specification to “none”. Since I used the desktop pool in question for almost 2 days now with the specified customization, I wasn’t about to put that option to “none”.

Things I tried to resolve the problem where:

(more…)

Today Virtualization.info published the news that VMware View 4.0 went into private beta with the Teradici PCoIP software implementation. I was unable to verify this but I assume it’s correct.

So why am I so excited about the upcoming version?
(more…)

As you may have read we are busy implementing a VMware View environment and have encountered numerous chalenges already.

Most of them have been solved by hard and innovative work or the upgrade from VMware View 3.0.1 to 3.1. Especially the upgrade to VMware View 3.1 resulted in a very good user- and administrator experience.

Unfortunately we kept having performance problems using various desktops (Windows XP or Vista). Scrolling through the Helpdesk tool and browsing web pages with moving graphics like Flash was very shaky even to the extend that desktop sessions froze when to much graphical information had to be processed. This was very strange because at another customer site VMware View worked like a charm with identical sizing but different clients (Wise vs Desktop PC).

A colleague, Anthony Winters, spend a lot of time analyzing these problems. The first thing he found out that performance was poor on the desktop but great on his laptop. He quickly eliminated all variables (network, switches, cabling) until he knew for sure the client was the problem.

(more…)

With one of our deployments of VMware View we had problems with the linked clones. Adding the computer accounts to Active Directory failed everytime. Even after recreating the pool it failed. Computer accounts weren’t created in Active Directory.

After a lot of troubleshooting, logfile reading and consulting with VMware Support a colleague said: Why are you entering spaces in the LDAP path?

(more…)

With the addition of VMware View your environment gains complexity. Before adding components like VMware View or Lab Manager you only have one point of logging in your virtual enviroment, vCenter Server. Now you have to look into the textfiles itself if you want to do some real troubleshooting.

(more…)

After a long day configuring various pools for VMware View I got some strange warning in the log from VMware View:

Missing VM was not in the original query: vm-234

I don’t like errors, especially in a newly configured server. in this case it also affected the rollout of In order to solve this I created a new pool but none of the machines in this new pool were provisioned.  Pools that were already present kept on working like a charm.

(more…)

Yesterday VMware released a maintenance release for VMware View, 3.0.1

Check out the link to see what’s new, changed or improved:

http://www.vmware.com/support/viewmanager3/doc/releasenotes_viewmanager301.html

(Yeah, I know, short post… Power for my notebook died today. Looks like it’s going to take a few days to get a replacement )