May
15

VM-FEX for VDI is Bogus

By | VDI Tips, VMware View

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I had wriiten a post, #VDI Tip 69: Use QofS – UCS and VMware View 5 but it’s misleading. The premise of using QofS is still a good and should be done. Since VM-FEX is dependent on the number of PCI-devices that your server can handle. Since you can only have 32 PCI-devices per server and some are taken up my various functions, the Max is really 30 desktops. The report mentions 30 desktops being used for testing but never declared it as a limiting factor. I declare this report as Bogus!

If you want to run QofS with VDI you will need a Nexus 1000v or use the virtual distributed switch(vDS) and run the QofS from the vDS. If your running VDI with 30 VM’s or less per server, you work for a hardware vendor :-)

May
06

Persona Bake-Off: View Persona 5.1 vs ProfileUnity

By | Featured, VDI Tips, VMware View

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Disclaimer: One is included and one will cost you money. List your goals for Persona Management before even looking at a product.

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Mar
12

Book Giveaway: View 5 Desktop Virtualization Solutions

By | Featured, Virtualization, VMware View

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Thanks for coming to my End User Computing Blog. I appericate the support and any feed back you can give. To say thank you to the community, I will be giving away the new VMware View 5 Desktop Virtualization Solutions by Jason Langone & Andre Leibovici. The winner will get the Print + eBook bundle.

Just a leave a comment related to VDI. Could be that your looking at implementing VDI , you love it, how you use it, anything! I’ll take the names and put them into a hat and let one of my daugthers pick it out of a hat(very scientific). The contest is open to the UK, US, Europe and selected countries in Asia(due to shipping) and will close once the book is GA.

    This book is a complete guide to planning and designing a solution based on VMware View 5
    Secure your Visual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) by having firewalls, antivirus, virtual enclaves, USB redirection and filtering and smart card authentication
    Analyze the strategies and techniques used to migrate a user population from a physical desktop environment to a virtual desktop solution
    A learn-by-example based approach that focuses on key concepts to provide the foundation to solve real world problems

Feb
12

#VDI Tip 58: Backup All Of Your Components At The Same Time

By | Featured, VDI Tips, VMware View

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Backing up all of the View components at the same time might seem like an obvious thing to do but it can be harder than you think. Failing to get close to the same backup window for the View Composer DB(SQL) as the ADAM database can leave you in a bit of a mess. Records may not matching up on a restore will have you deleting virtual machines or records from other parts of the ADAM database to fix inconsistencies.

Inside of the View Administrator console there isn’t a set time that you can select from. The Time starts at Midnight and you can only adjust the frequency, hourly, weekly and so on. You can just adjust it to the hourly setting and that should get you close to what your DBA’s are doing.
I don’t like running backups all day if there isn’t a reason . To get an exact start time you have to head off into the ADAM database. Please read this post for help backing up and connecting to the ADAM database before making any changes.

In the ADAM database Expand OU=Properties, select OU=Server, select CN= in the right pane, and choose Action > Properties to modify the pae-LDAPBUTime. The pae-LDAPBUTime property is the Number of minutes after pae-LDAPBUUnits to perform a backup. Since we left the default of Midnight everything will be based off that time. Therefore, if we but in 60 the next backup should fire at 1:00 am.

ADAM VMware View - Settings

IT WORKED!

Hope that helps. If you have a thought or questions drop me a line.