There’s a KB article on this topic http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2006859, if you are interested I would suggest bookmarking it or subscribing to it.

I want to point out though that you can run Windows 8 in Workstation 8 or Fusion 4. Yes I know that these are paid products, but you can download the eval version which is valid for 30 days. Workstation 8 comes with VMware Player 4.0, which is completely free! (Not available as a separate download yet unfortunately.)

Installing Windows 8 is straight forward, just use the Windows 7 – 64 Bit profile that is part of both Fusion and Workstation.

My Workstation which runs Windows 7 with VMware Workstation on top of it. The most important change is the addition of an SSD drive. I ran two nice Seagate Cheetah 15k SAS drives in RAID-0 for a while, but started to get annoyed by the ticking sound these drives produce. It’s not a defect it is part of the mechanism, but very annoying background noise.

• Asustek P6T WS Pro
• Intel Core i7-920
• Kingston SSDNow 256GB (new)
• 6 x 2GB Kingston 1333Mhz

And another substantial change is the lab storage. I used to run on two Iomega IX4′s. Although these are very cool devices unfortunately they are “limited” to four drives and I was looking for some more capabilities to extend some of the tests I am conducting. I just received a brand new Drobo B800i with 6 x 7.2k Sata drives. Which means I have two slots left which I might just fill up with SSD for the sake of it.

• Drobo B800i (new)
• 6 x Western Digital 7.2k Drive

If I would give one tip though to the Drobo folks, make the dashboard available over http/https rather than a separate utility. Hopefully I can do some performance testing next week or the week after when I have some more time on my hands.

Conversion is as simple as:

./ovftool "source.ovf" "target"

Optionally you could use parameters that are described in full detail when running ovftool –help. What remains is importing the created .vmx into Fusion, that’s it.

-ray

When you select the option to encrypt the drive, BitLocker then encrypts the whole disk (rather than just the files). At our customer however, when doing this over VMware View 4.5 USB redirection in an RDP session, the user was rewarded with “Access Denied” instead.

With PCoIP, it worked fine. It also works fine on RDP if you are an administrator. We quickly established that what looked at first like a USB redirection issue was in fact environment specific. We were able to encrypt the drive without issue in our test lab over both PCoIP and RDP. A day or so of fun inside Process Monitor and the (non-obvious) answer was found:

Set a DWORD called
HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\RemovableStorageDevices\AllowRemoteDASD
with the value
1

Fortunately there’s a corresponding GPO setting for this: Go to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > System > Removable Storage Access > All Removable Storage and set Allow direct access in remote sessions to Enabled.

Click for full size version showing the path

We set that, rebooted and BitLocker then worked fine. PCoIP seems to be unaffected by this issue, likely because it’s not a remote session/separate session in the same way an RDP session is.

Credit for the hard work goes to my colleague Reno Finch. Well done, Reno.

Ian Gibbs

Ian works for Virtual Clarity who consult on enterprise scale virtualisation.

To be honest I am not a View SME, but I do know a thing or two about HA/vSphere in general. So the first thing that I mentioned was that it wasn’t a good idea. Although VDI in general is all about density not running HA in these environments could lead to serious issues when a host fails.

Now, just imagine you have 80 Desktop VMs per host running and roughly 8 hosts in a DRS only cluster on NFS based storage. One of those hosts is isolated from the network…. what happens?

1. User connection is dropped
2. VMDK Lock times out
3. User tries to reconnect
4. Broker powers on the VM on a new host

Now that sounds great doesn’t it? Well yeah in a way it does, but what happens when the host is not isolated anymore?

Indeed, the VMs were still running. So basically you have a split brain scenario. The only way in the past to avoid this was to make sure you had HA enabled and had set HA to power off the VM.

But with vSphere 4 Update 2 a new mechanism has been introduced. I wanted to stress this, as some people have already made assumption that it is part of AAM/HA. It actually isn’t… The question for powering off the VM to recover from the split brain scenario is generated by “hostd” and answered by “vpxa”. In other words, with or without HA enabled ESX(i) will recover the split brain

Again, I am most definitely not a Desktop/View guy so I am wondering how the View experts out there look against disabling HA on your View Compute Cluster. (Note that on the Management Layer this should be enabled.)

VMware Desktop Technical Marketing & TS Research Labs are jointly announcing the availability of VMware Desktop Reference Architecture Workload Simulator (RAWC) version 1.1.    With RAWC 1.1, Solution Providers can better anticipate and plan for infrastructure requirements to support successful VMware View deployments for Windows 7 Migration.

RAWC 1.1 now simulates user workloads in Windows 7 environments and can be used to validate VMware View designs to support Windows 7 Migrations.  RAWC 1.1 supports the following desktop applications in Windows 7 and Windows XP environments: Microsoft Office 2007, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, Java code compilation simulator, Adobe Acrobat, McAfee Virus Scan, and 7-Zip.

RAWC 1.1 also includes bug fixes and several enhancements in test run configurations, usability and user interface.  Please see RAWC 1.1 product documents for more details.

VMware partners can download RAWC 1.1 software and the product documents from VMware Partner Central:Sales Tools > Services IP.

View Manager Version 4.0.1 | 18 February 2010 | Build: 233023 (View Manager), 210930 (View Composer)

What’s New:

VMware View 4.0.1 is a maintenance release that resolves some known issues in the previous releases. For details, see the Resolved Issues section.

This release includes the following new features.
Localization of VMware View

The View Client and online help for View Client are now available in Japanese, French, German, and simplified Chinese. The View Manager Administration Guide, View Manager Release Notes, Getting Started with VMware View document, View Upgrade Guide, and View Architecture Planning Guide are also available in these languages.
VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 6 and ESX 3.5 Update 5 Support

View Manager 4.0.1 includes support for VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 6 and ESX 3.5 Update 5.
Enhancements to the PCoIP Display Protocol

PCoIP now supports the following features:

• Virtual Printing, which allows end users to use local or network printers from a View desktop without requiring that additional print drivers be installed in the View desktop.
• Single sign-on support for third party providers such as Sentillion and Imprivata.
• View Client supports international keyboards when using PCoIP.

For PCoIP-related bug fixes, see the View Client Resolved Issues section.

Of course multiple issues have been fixed in the maintenance release. For more details read here.

I do however was impressed with Partner Exchange. From a logistics standpoint PEX was well organized so my compliments to the organization. The labs, the sessions, the workshops… I wish I could have joined any of these. I’m not complaining though as being part of the VCDX Panel is also a great experience. Seeing the creative solutions people come up with is a learning experience for me as well. Some people have a different view on a concept or solution and this also gives me food for thought. Another thing what I love about being part of the panel is making people think about their own design. I can’t say much about the interviews I conducted though as the NDA police would kill me. I hope to see some of you who are taking the defense in Munich!

I did manage to see the keynote by Steve Herrod by the way. I was impressed with all the insights Steve gave in terms of upcoming products, brand new projects and even a couple tech previews. I am looking forward to the upcoming version of VMware View and a new project which I can’t disclose as the VMware NDA Police would again kill me. I am also looking forward to start using Zimbra.

Especially “Zimlets” seem to be really powerful. Zimlets are basically hook-ins for your email/colaboration tool. A good example would be an Oracle plugin. When an email for instance contains a PO number the PO number will appear as a link to the PO system. But not only a link, when hovering over the link a pop-up will appear with for instance the total amount for the PO and the approval status.

Other upcoming new features that were revealed are IO DRS, Memory Compression and a new View management interface. I recommend reading some of the other blog posts on this topic as there is a lot I can’t write about:

• Gabe’s Virtual World -  News from VMware Partner Exchange
• Brian Knudtson
• Scott Lowe – Session 1 – Session 2 – Session 3
• Steve Jin – PEX Day 1|party – Day 2 – Day 3 -  Day 4
• Chad Sakac – VMware Partner Exchange 2010 from where I sat…

And by the way; Congrats Frank and Andrew Mitchell for becoming VCDX 029 and 030!

We started by testing a job typical of the users; a PDF consisting of scanned black and white pages. He we measured the data passed on the network for each of ThinPrint’s compression settings.

Pretty decent, we thought, for a test document that is all A4 images. Now to try a pilot.

One all VDI office has 63 users. All of them use Wyse terminals, so using the ThinPrint compression built in to VMware View is not an option. We wanted to test whether or not ThinPrint was worth buying. Of the 63, 40 use only ThinPrint printers. For them, their print jobs go from VM to the .print Engine for VMware View in the datacentre, to the Windows print server in the office. The others print direct from their VDI desktop hosted in the datacenter to the Windows print server in the office.

There are four printers, three HP A4 monochrome lasers and one Xerox A3 colour printer (with the colour drums removed…). Each printer is accessible via ThinPrint and directly. ThinPrint is set to ‘Optimum’ compression.

I dragged out the stats on the amount of print data transferred for each of six consecutive business days:

Not that interesting in and of itself, unless you know how many jobs were sent by each method, but it gave me an idea of the degree of variability. So then I chose to look into day 6 a bit further.

So over that day over a whole range of print jobs, the average ThinPrint job was 21% of the size of the normal job. Pretty good – and much better than the 90% we experienced with the single test document. This shows if you want to test its performance, use a real world selection of documents.

The real question is, if I switch all the office to ThinPrint, or abandon it altogether, what is my predicted print data for a day?

Hmmm. The amount of data transferred over the line would be equivalent to a constant background rate of 125Kbps. I know my print traffic is peaky, but QoS settings on the link will smooth that out. That’s just 6% of a 2Mbps line for 60 people. Hardly a killer. In fact, since we can only get 30 RDP sessions on a 4Mbps line, I will need 8Mbps of capacity for my 60 users, making the print traffic just 3% of my line.

What about the other features of .print Engine for VMware View? We pretty quickly had to abandon driver-free printing to get features such as double-sided printing and A3 to work, and none of the other features have been of any practical use to me. You might find the ability to limit the print traffic to a certain rate useful if you don’t have that level of control over your line.

At €23 per user, and my SDSL line at €200 per month, it would take me 19 years to recoup my investment in ThinPrint. I think I’ll pass, thanks…

Ian

This is decently documented here, but how do you know which ones you can delete?

I don’t and have never worked in the Composer team, so corrections and additions welcome on the below especially where I have marked (???), but observation of the tasks shows the process is as follows:

1. Copy parent VM at certain snapshot to a new VM called temp-<ridiculousGUID> in the same place as the parent VM
2. Delete that VM (??? Clearly something else is happening, but you watch the tasks)
3. Copy that VM to each datastore and register as replica-<ridiculousGUID> (???)
4. Create a linked clone off each replica in the same datastore, and register as source-<ridiculousGUID>
5. For each VM, copy the source VM to a new directory and link it back to the replica

All well and good until this process breaks down and you’re left with the broken bodies of hapless VMs lying around. So you should have one source and one replica VM for each parent snapshot deployed in each datastore. The formula is

VMs in replica folder = <Num. parent snapshots in active use> x <Num. datastores> x 2

In my environment I have one parent VM snapshot in use by 40 VMs spread across 4 datastores. So:

1 snapshot x 4 datastores x 2 = 8 VMs in replica folder

So I should have 8 in there. What do I actually have?

Err, 10. Those two temp- VMs ought to have been deleted by the composer. This is the view after I’d done aload of cleaning up – I originally had all sorts of dead source and replica VMs in there. How do I know which ones are actively in use and which can be deleted? A simple tip is to change the value of the Notes property of the parent VM, and redeploy your clones. Anything the Composer is still properly in charge of and not using will be deleted automatically. Anything else will be very visible. Look at that image again, and you’ll see that the two temp VMs have different date values in the Notes column. They are from a previous snapshot, and can be deleted. Follow the process in the link above to unprotect them, and then right-click and Delete from disk.

I have now deleted about 15 different source, replica and temp VMs in this way, and all operation is still normal.

Ian