Planet vSphere-land

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 [...] Leave A Commentposted in How To by Sander Martijn

UPDATED May 26 – New links included Mike Brennan’s latest blog going into the testing and details of the CVD - http://blogs.cisco.com/?p=114587 Scaling CVD for XenDesktop and EMC on Cisco <—-NEWEST Version of the paper!!!! Back a few months ago I shared about the joint reference architecture that was able to boot and login 5000 users in 30 minutes. Using the Cisco UCS runn...

My VMware colleague Tristan Tod (@tristantodd) put together an excellent presentation about VDI and related storage technologies. One of my favorite parts of his presentation deck was the “A Brief History of Desktop Storage Architecture”, wich in my personal opinion is extremely valuable for VDI architects and administrators. I have added some personal comments and links but mos...

I have recently been invited to present in a VMware User Group (VMUG), which I quickly answered with a big and resounding Yes! I really love to present and touch base with customers as that helps me to keep it real, instead of being a lab rat type of engineer/architect. Mostly I look forward to present and talk about new VMware endeavors in the EUC space, things such as MDM, MAM, the new HTML5 c...

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 ...

The recent rumors of Microsoft working on a hosted virtual desktop (DaaS) solution to add to their cloud services offering may actually end up being one of the most viable options for organizations who already rely heavily on Microsoft infrastructure to run their business. Having all of your core services being delivered from a single location and provider could ease the operational concerns ...

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 ...

Not so long ago, VMware product releases were staggered.  Major versions of vSphere would launch at or shortly after VMworld in the fall, and all other products such as SRM, View, vCloud Director, etc. would rev on some other random schedule.  This was extremely frustrating for a vEvangelist because we wanted to be on the latest and greatest platform but lack of compatibility with the remainin...

Those who manage VMware View currently or have used it in the past may be familiar with desktop customization which is required to provide a unique identity on the network for each View Composer VDI session in a pool.  If you’ve got a pretty good Microsoft background, you’re probably already familiar with Sysprep – Microsoft’s tool for customizing Windows server and desk...

USB 3.0 is capable of transfer speeds of up to 5Gbps (gigabits per second); that’s a little over 10 times faster than USB 2.0′s 480Mbps. In practice, it won’t always be this much faster — mileage may vary depending on hardware configuration — but it will always be much faster than USB 2.0 (USB 2.0 vs USB 3.0)   USB 3.0 devices are not supported in Horizon View 5.2 or e...

It’s that joyous time of year again! VMworld is fast approaching and Public Voting is NOW OPEN.  This year I’ve submitted three different Ask the Expert sessions with focus on different topics, so there should be an Ask the Expert session for you! I’ve also submitted a great session on integrating two great technologies, vSphere Metro Cluster and VMware Horizon View, you shoul...

Data Protection and patch management of virtual desktops, while not a sexy topic, is one that should happen on a regular basis within any organization implementing or working to implement virtual desktops. Recently, we have been testing virtual desktop software and there is a huge difference between patching and protecting data in a small number of instances and 1000s of instances. There are s...

  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...

Yesterday I published a blog post entitled “Why you should move your VDI to Windows 8” comparing different versions of Windows during IDLE and Login process. One of my readers (John Hardman) suggested that I also should measure disk IO commands issued from multiple Windows OS during boot time. What I found in the additional test is another pretty compelling reason to move VDI envir...

I believe I may have found a pretty compelling reason to migrate your VDI deployment to Windows 8. While running some experiments I collected some statistics for Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 2K8 Server running as virtual desktops. At this point we should all be familiar with the challenges associated with the number and latency of IOs in VDI environments, therefore I am not getting getting...

Hi everyone, it’s Alastair here, @DemitasseNZ. I missed out on the chance to do the VCAP5-DTD beta exam at the end of last year, primarily because New Zealand shuts down from Christmas for a couple of week as it’s the middle of our summer. So when the exam was released to general availability last week I wanted to get it booked and sat as quick as possible.  This morning was the appoint...

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...

Gabrie van Zanten at gabesvirtualworld.com published an updated to his PowerShell script that enables Horizon View to utilize dynamic IP addressing for PCoIP connections using whatsmyip.com. This pretty cool for people installing Horizon View at home for lab purposes.   Update: I have checked the script to work with VMware View 4.6, VMware View 5.0, VMware View 5.1 and VMware View Horizon 5...

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...

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 ...

This week I received an interesting question from a colleague that I had also been asked in the past. However, in the past I was not able to present a good solution for the problem. Let me present the scenario. A VMware View pool of persistent desktops was created and provided to developers using the Linked Cloning technology. Over time the developers deployed their own applications and created ...