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.

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

Yes there are a couple of bloggers out there who are focussing onView like my colleague Christoph Dommermuth but compared to the “core” product their share is tiny. For me personally there’s a simple reason you don’t see me blogging about View, it’s not part of my focus area.

Something I overlooked during the discussion are the two excellent whitepapers/articles Herco van Brugh wrote. The first one is a brand new whitepaper and discusses how to correctly scale your storage based on a couple simple formulas.

1. Download whitepaper here. (NEW!)
   Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, or VDI, is hot. It’s cool, secure, centrally managed, flexible – it’s an IT manager’s dream.
   However, as it turns out, there is a hidden danger to VDI. There’s a killer named “IOPS”.
2. Creating a VDI template
   This guide is based on Windows XP because of its low resources usage compared to Vista and even Windows 7. The general idea however also applies to those versions although specific services and registry keys will most likely not work. Skipping Vista, the next version of this guide will focus on Windows 7.

Another thing I overlooked when I was doing a little research were the Reference Architectures EMC did. There’s some good info to be found in these. So it seems that there is info out there, I guess the “problem” is that there are only 1 or 2 bloggers who are solely focusing on View. So if you are a VDI/View Consultant now it is time to speak up. Step into the world of blogging and let your voice be heard!

Why would you use vAudit? vAudit has been developed to show you when your VDI Users are logging in and for how long they are using the virtual desktop. I think it is the ideal auditing tool during a Proof of Concept. Are your users actually using it as much as they are saying? When are they using it and for how long?

vAudit has an export to CSV feature which enables you to analyze trends regarding usage. Below you can find the release notes and a link to the download section of Richard’s site.

Download Version 1.5

• vAudit now also checks for login failures, so you can detect if people are trying to hack into your system.
• You can now resize the username column, so you can actually read the username if you have long domain names.
• When you MouseOver a session, it will display the machine name and time information.

In the next release, I will try to add information about your top users, make an export function and at some point will give your a graph with daily concurrent usage.

• VMware View with PCoIP – PCoIP provides an optimized desktop experience for the delivery of the entire desktop environment including applications, images, audio, and video content for a wide range of users on the LAN or across the WAN. PCoIP can compensate for an increase in latency or a reduction in bandwidth, to ensure that end users can remain productive regardless of network conditions.
• PCoIP includes VMware View Display with support for up to four monitors and the ability to deliver the optimal resolution and pivot orientation to each monitor independently.
• VMware vSphere Support – VMware vSphere 4 support enables improved virtual machine scalability, performance, and management, with continued support for VMware Infrastructure 3.x.
• Enhanced single sign-on – The Log in as current user feature is integrated with Active Directory and smart cards to help simplify the process of logging in to a VMware View desktop.
• Restricted entitlements – Administrators can control user access to virtual desktops based on the View Connection Server being used for authentication.
• Smart card policies – Administrators can set group policies to force desktop disconnection and require reconnection when users remove smart cards.
• Domain filtering – You can use vdmadmin.exe to control the accessibility of domains and traverse trust relationships more quickly.

The full release notes can be found here.

A basic Windows XP machine can do a lot of things. Apart from facilitating an environment for a user’s applications, it can do things like self maintenance, updates, hardware changes, etc. This is nice in a physical environment with lots of different pieces of hardware but in a virtual instance things hardly change, the environment is pretty much set and all tricks to speed things up usually have an adverse effect on the infrastructure. All these virtual instances need to share the often rather limited amount of resources.

To keep things in check, there’s a lot of things that can be done to optimize an XP image for a virtual desktop. This guide is created from several documents that are already out there but also from our own experience and experience from a couple of other VDI specialists.

This guide is based on Windows XP because of its low resources usage compared to Vista and even Windows 7. The general idea however also applies to those versions although specific services and registry keys will most likely not work. Skipping Vista, the next version of this guide will focus on Windows 7.

Latest Release: 4.0.0 Beta 1 (October 2, 2009)

VMware View Open Client version 4.0.0 Beta 1 is now available on the Downloads page.

Please see the release announcement for a summary of what’s included in this release.

Features

Some of the features included are:

• Ability to create a secure tunnel using SSL
• Support for two factor authentication with RSA SecurID
• Novell SLETC Add-On RPM package
• Full command line interface

The following features are NOT included in this release:

• USB redirection
• Multiple desktop sessions
• Multimedia redirection

For a full list of features please refer to the README.txt file available with the distribution.

Compatibility

This release is compatible with VMware Virtual Desktop Manager (VDM) 2.0, 2.1, and VMware View Manager 3.0 and 3.1.

If I have some time on my hands I will try to make a bootable stripped Linux CD that holds this client, or maybe a USB key is a better idea…. let me think about it.