Planet vSphere-land

After publishing What’s New in VMware Horizon View 5.2 (Beyond Marketing) I received the same question multiple times from different customers and colleagues in regards to the following excerpt from my article.   A new Print Redirection codebase has been introduced that supports Windows 8, and also fixes a number of outstanding issues.   In the following table you can see what ...

If you are wondering why my blog posting frequency has slowed down in the last couple weeks – worry not! Many consulting professionals and architects asked for a portable – offline – version of my  well-known VDI Calculator. I’m happy to say that the new tool finally coming and I’ve been busy trying to reach code complete. This new version is built on Java ...

Introducing EMC ViPR This is the first in a three part series, read part II here, and part III here. During the recent EMCworld event in Las Vegas among other things, EMC announced ViPR (read announcement here) . Note that this ViPR is not the same EMC Viper project from a few years ago that [...]

Well maybe not often, that’s the way they used to do it in Chicago in the old days. I did want to make a plea to get your votes for my sessions at VMworld. I have several I submitted as part of HP and I promise to make them as technical as possible. My Top 10 things you must know about storage for vSphere session is crammed full of technical info, so much so that I’ve had to trim i...

If you are attending EMC World 2013 in Las Vegas next week and is interested in how to effectively deliver Desktop-as-a-Service using EMC technologies you should attend my session with EMC’s Matt Cowger. In this session we will discuss what DaaS really mean to organizations and what are the associated challenges - infrastructure resiliency, licensing costs, IO Profiles, self-service, ...

The VMworld Public Session Voting is now Open to anyone and allows VMware to poll the general public on which sessions they want to see presented at the event. This year I decided submit only co-hosted sessions with people who are specialist in their product areas. People like Mac Binesh, Director for Horizon Performance; John Dodge, Tech Marketing DIrector; and Narasimha Krishnakumar, Horizon...

  If you are in the San Francisco Bay Are make sure you attend the Silicon Valley VMUG User Conference. The event is scheduled for Wednesday, May 1st 2013 in the Santa Clara Convention Center. This event is almost a mini VMworld with many attendees and exhibitors expected. I am honored host a session entitled “Getting Storage Right for your VDI Environment“. As you can imagine the...

How a pressure cooker should be used for good things First, let me say condolences to those and their families that were killed and/or injured in the tragic terrorist act at the Boston marathon bombings this past week. Second, let me say thank you and congratulations to all of those involved in capturing one of [...]

For those of you who start thinking about VCAP-CIA exam, which is an exam on vCloud Director – at the Datacenter Advanced Professional level. This exam is now available through VMware Education. When passing this exam, you’ll automatically become VCP-Cloud certified. VCAP-CIA stands for VMware Certified Advanced Professional – Cloud Infrastructure administration. There is a re...

Riding the current software defined data center (SDC) wave being led by the likes of VMware and software defined networking (SDN) also championed by VMware via their acquisition of Nicira last year, Software Defined Marketing (SDM) is in full force. HP being a player in providing the core building blocks for traditional little data and big data, along with physical, virtual, converged, cloud a...

It was 2010 when I first published in my blog the online VDI calculator for View and for XenDesktop. In April 2011 I stopped updating and supporting the XenDesktop version of the calculator, but it is still available in my blog. The calculator has since been trough multiple upgrade cycles, and new functionalities have been added according to the VMware View product evolution. However, many peopl...

When VMware View 5.1 was release I wrote about the changes to storage and memory footprint when the 3D software rendering option was enabled. VMware View 5.0 3D Reverse Engineered vSphere 5.0 New .vswp file & Storage Tax on VDI Just to recap: ESxi 5.0 implements a second .vswp file for every virtual machine created either with hardware version 7 or 8. This second .vswp file is dedicated ...

I have just release the Horizon View VDI Calculator v.3.1 with important updates to the graphics stack in order to correctly support the new 3D software and hardware rendering. What’s New in Release 3.1 - Added support for new 3D functionalities in Horizon View 5.2 - Added support for 64, 128, 256 and 512MB Video RAM - Removed 24 or 32 bit color option - Video resolutions removed: 800×600...

Imagine you have the possibility to plugin a single (or multiple) SSDs to each of your host of you cluster running VMware vSphere, and create a very fast redundant storage tier based on flash. In addition, no existing network or storage changes are necessary. Pure fiction? Not really. PernixData is new startup company, which works on [...]Read the full post Flash Virtualization Platform (FVP) &...

This a response to Gabrie van Zanten’s question – Design question: Why vCenter Server Datacenter? To summarize, Gabe argues that the datacenter object in vCenter creates artificial limits on his operational abilities and asks why he shouldn’t just use folder objects across sites. Gabe postulates that perhaps the default for our designs should be to avoid multiple datacenter obj...

Services Providers and large customers with requirement for multi-tenant Desktop-as-a-Service frequently ask me how would be possible to integrate Horizon View and vCloud Director and get both technologies to work together. As of today, the official VMware answer is – this is not supported. In this article I demonstrate how multi-tenant implementations with View and vCD is achievable with some...

March 2013 News letter Welcome to the March 2013 edition of the StorageIO Update news letter including a new format and added content. You can get access to this news letter via various social media venues (some are shown below) in addition to StorageIO web sites and subscriptions. Click on the following links to view the March 2013 edition as (HTML sent via Email) version, or PDF ve...

Horizon View 5.2 provides Microsoft Lync 2013 client support, including full support for UC VoIP and Video on both RDP and PCoIP. This new feature enable a tighter integration between Microsoft Lync and Office applications with full collaboration capabilities. Microsoft Lync 2013 client is a Unified Communications (UC) application that is installed on a desktop.  Microsoft Lync client is us...

View Pool Manager allow Horizon View administrators to easily manage users across desktop pools and security groups in large deployments. One of the of the biggest challenges View administrators face in large deployments is the desktop pool maintenance. Commonly each desktop pool has an Active Directory security groups with the correct amount of users a given desktop pool will support. As employ...

I have just release the Horizon View VDI Calculator v.3.0 with full support for Horizon View 5.2 and vCenter 5.1. This is a major release of the calculator with multiple enhancements to mostly support higher scalability with the new versions of View and vCenter.   What’s New in Release 3.0 - Added support for pools with 2,000 desktops – Added support for new processors with 12 ...

John Troyer @jtroyer is the man behind the vExpert program. He is the guy that does that magic…. he is able to bring the passionate people (us) together, as a community.  He has made the announcement that vExpert 2013 applications are now available, check it out. vExpert Applications 2013 are open. The deadline for applications is April 15, 2013. [...]Read the full post vExpert Applic...

I’m delighted to reveal that the new version of the VMware vSphere Design book is now available from leading book stores.        The electronic versions are widely available now, and hard copies can be pre-ordered and should ship within the next couple of weeks. Scott Lowe (blog/twitter) and I worked hard to include all the vSphere 5.x changes in this edition. Quoting from th...

The vSphere-Land.com Top Virtualization blog results are in and while not I didn’t make top 10 I did manage to move up a few spots with your help! This year JPaul.me was voted number 42 (out of almost 250 sites), up 7 slots from last year’s 49th place. The results are located on Eric’s site [...]

Eric Siebert (@ericsiebert) from vSphere-Land has just published results for the 2013 Best VMware and Virtualization Blog Election. My blog finished in 14th place, coming down from the 17th position last year and 39th place the year before. Thanks to all my readers for the votes! The announcement was made during a special vChat  recorded with special guests John Troyer, David Davis and Simo...

This year’s Top Virtualization Blog 2013 competition was even more crazy than last year. With many new blogs out there, many new bloggers who did a great job this year and made it to the Top 25 blogs. My blog moved up to 16th place -:) which is incredible with all those quality blogs out there. I’m [...]Read the full post Top Virtualization Blog 2013 Results – my thoughts at ...