In my experience, VMware View licensing isn’t any simpler to understand. To save you a headache later on, let’s look at how to properly license your virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environment with VMware View.

For more read on at SearchVMware.com

So, what is the Wyse PocketCloud app? From the website: “Need complete access to a cloud, your PC, Remote Desktop Services, a Terminal Server, VMware View or virtual machine from the palm of your hand? With Wyse PocketCloudâ„¢, it’s no problem! Wyse PocketCloud allows you to securely access your desktop anytime and anywhere on your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad.“

As I said, the first time I tried was in the bus at Tech Field Day. I used the Wyse PocketCloud app to connect to my home VMware View environment and I was quite impressed by the performance, considering it was a WiFi connection from iPad to a MiFi device, which routed the traffic over 3G to the internet all the way to the other side of the world to Belgium while driving.

When I finally got my iPad and had tried some free RDP iPad apps, I decide to buy the Wyse PocketCloud app, although certainly not cheap at $14.99, it is worth the price. Let’s have a walk through the app.

After starting the app, the first thing to do is create a connection. You can choose to connect to a VMware View environment or not. Choosing “Off” on the first slider will make this a RDP connection.

You fill out the obvious connection details and then you can choose one of the desktop pools that View offers you. In my case I can choose between 4 different desktop pools.

Next step is to select the screen resolution you want to work with. A very nice option is that you can choose between landscape and portrait mode for the iPad. However, once in a session switching your iPad between portrait and landscape mode doesn’t always work the way you want it. Sometimes a part of the screen just disappears when switching back and forth.

Two very good features when connected are the tools bar and the special mouse pointer they developed. With the toolbar you have quick access to a special keyboard, screen capture feature and special right click feature. The mouse pointer has changed into something that looks like a magnifying glass you normally put on a map. It makes it very easy to navigate and point the mouse pointer directly at a small portion of the screen. The mouse pointer also has some extra features like pressing it down for a few seconds to drag and drop or make vertical scrolling and combo keys very easy.

Personally I found the mouse pointer to be very handy and make a big difference when navigating. The only problem I had with it was trying to hit the Windows Start button. Even though it is very handy, it does take some time to get used to the extra functions before you use them fluently.

Conclusion: If you have an iPad and want to sometimes quickly access some applications offered to you through RDP or VMware View, then Wyse PocketCloud is the way to go. Why did I use the word “sometimes”? Well, despite the fact that this app is great and the iPad is a great device, it is not a device you will be working on all day like you do with a laptop or desktop pc, but is ideal when you quickly have to read a document someone e-mailed you, do a review of a document and write little comments, but just not for working all day on it. Which is fine, every device has its place.

Edit: As Joe Kelly pointed out in the comments section, I forgot to mention there also is a “Wyse PocketCloud Windows Companion“. When you install this into the desktop you’re accessing remotely, you can use the server-side browser capability, enabling full access to Web sites with Flash content. I haven’t been able to try this yet.

After doing some digging in the vCenter licensing overview it became clear what happened. For this customer we had bought two license packs each to support 10 VDI VMs:

• VMware View4 premium bundle starter kit (10 pack)
• VMware View4 premium bundle 10 pack

This gave us the following licenses each with a serial number which I of course don’t publish J

The problem Jon was facing, was that it was impossible to just add those 20 (2×10) licenses to vCenter without assigning them to a host. Because, in our believe, there should just be 20 licenses in some sort of pool that each VDI VM would take one license from. It is possible to assign multiple hosts to one license so they can share the number of available VMs in that license. What you can’t do is have a host connect to more than one license, which in our opinion would also be feasible. In our situation this left us with the following config:

As you can see, the two packs of 10 licenses are dedicated to one or more hosts and each powered on VM gets a license assigned. When putting one host into maintenance mode, all VMs would be moved to the other host and that host would run out of licenses. In View3 the license limits were only an administrative limit but since View4 this has changed and this will prevent you of booting up more VMs than licenses available.

After searching the VMware KB, it became clear there is an issue with licenses in View4:

KB 1017153: VMware View 4.0 virtual machines on an ESX 4.0 host do not power on
Symptoms

• Virtual machines on an ESX 4.0 host do not power on.
• This issue occurs even if less connections are active than the View Manager is licensed for.
• You see the error: There is not enough capacity for this operation.
• This issue only applies to customers using View 4 bundles that include vSphere for Desktops, vCenter Server and View Manager.
• This issue does not occur if you are running on vSphere per CPU with View Manager.

Resolution
This issue occurs because of a restriction on the number of powered on virtual machines. To workaround this issue, contact VMware Licensing Support at VI-Hotline@vmware.com to obtain a temporary license key.

After being in contact with licensing support we received a temporary unlimited VMs license key that ends June 30^th 2010 as VMware expects to have a solution by then. Personally we already marked June as the month in which we will start calling VMware again to find out where we can download a patch.

In November 2008, I’ve written three articles on a comparison of Hyper-V vs ESX which attracted quite a number of readers.

Hyper-V, not in my datacenter (part 1 – Hardware)

Hyper-V, not in my datacenter (part 2: Guest OS and Memory overcommit)

Hyper-V, not in my datacenter (part 3: Motions and storage)

Lately I received some requests to do a presentation on these articles before a live audience (everybody was strip-searched before entering the room). I created the presentation and have presented it a number of times now and received good responses on it. A number of people asked me to put it online, so here it is.

There are two versions, one in dutch and one in english (many thanks to Wil van Antwerpen for the translation):

VMware ESX vs Hyper-V DU v2

And the english version:

VMware ESX vs Hyper-V EN v2

Below is a link to the pdf. It is only in dutch.

netopus-6-2008

At the dutch datacenter & hosting summit I was allowed to give a presentation about VDI. Again in dutch. here is the link to the Powerpoint 2007 presentation:

vdi-zo-simpel-nog-niet-v2

DV07 – Optimizing storage for virtual desktops

(Tony Armstrong – VMware, Mike Slisinger & M. Vaughan Stewart (NetApp)

To be honest, this was one of the session I didn’t like. I would have expected this session to be about how to work with storage in a VDI environment, but it turned out to be a commercial talk for NetApp and what they can do.

NetApp presented the following products:

• Raid-DP. Its a fault tolerant disk setup like Raid10, but using only the amount of disks of a Raid config.

• Data De-Duplication. This looks like ESX’s transparent page sharing for memory but now on disk. When identical blocks of data would have been written to disk, NetApp writes the identical blocks only once. This of course can save some diskspace, maybe even a higher percentage then transparent page sharing does because there is a lot more identical data on disk.

• FlexClone for fast storage provisioning. A very nice technique which can deliver a 1000 VMs in a minute.

All the options presented by NetApp seem very usable in a VDI environment. Definitely something to look at when deploying VDI in a very large scale environment. Also check out the other storage vendors, because I was told by a colleague that he had seen similar options with other vendors.

]]> http://www.gabesvirtualworld.com/dv07-%e2%80%93-optimizing-storage-for-virtual-desktops/feed/ 3 http://www.gabesvirtualworld.com/dv02-%e2%80%93-implementing-vdi-using-vdm2-tips-and-tricks/ http://www.gabesvirtualworld.com/dv02-%e2%80%93-implementing-vdi-using-vdm2-tips-and-tricks/#comments Sat, 01 Mar 2008 00:29:33 +0000 Gabrie van Zanten http://www.gabesvirtualworld.com/?p=49

DV02 – Implementing VDI using VDM2, tips and tricks

(Puneet Chawla)

 

VDI is catching on with more and more companies. Personally I’ve not had the question yet to implement it, but I do get questions from my customers about what VDI is and if its suited for them. So, this was a must see session for me.

 

An important aspect of VDI is the sizing. Everyone would like to know how many desktops they can run on an ESX host. According to Puneet you should be able to get 6-12 VMs per core, depending on the workload, with an industry average of 8 desktops per core. I was a bit disappointed by this, because surely in this stage, VDI will compete with Citrix WhatEverWeAreCallingItThisYear 4.5 (sorry Mike Laverick for my brutal copy of your joke) at first and I think 8 desktops per core is much less then what I hoped for.

Puneet continued to give some tips when building your VDI client:

-          The virtual LSI Logic SCSI controller is recommend for your VM

-          Make sure your network labels are consistent over all hosts (dhuh).

-          Set Windows screensaver to the blank screensaver

-          Enable 24bit color for RDP

-          Enable Remote Desktop users through a domain group

-          Install VDM Agent for USB pass-through and single sign on

-          Ofcourse, install the VMware Tools

-          In the VMware Tools you can also find a special option for Wyse Multi Media support, use it if you use Wyse terminals

-          Defrag and compress your template

 I would like to add to this list, my own tip: use nLite to make your desktop as small as possible. See my article at:  http://www.gabesvirtualworld.com/?p=39.

Using VDM2 you can make sure there is always a number of VDI desktops waiting for the next client that wants to connect. Per template VDI desktop you can set the minimum and maximum number of copies that should be created. For this pool of desktops, you can also set the number that should be online or immediately available when a client connects. For example:

-          Minimum number of desktops = 50

-          Maximum number of desktops = 100

-          Number of online desktops = 20

 

When this new desktop has been staged, VDM will automatically create 50 copies. From those 50, 20 will be started and running, waiting for a customer. At a given point, there will never be more then 100 copies of this desktop running. A thing that I couldn’t find out yet, is what will happen when 10 users are connected. My guess (but again, I’m not sure) is that you will then have 30 running VMs (10 with users, 20 without).

 

As a last note Puneet pointed out that there is a special ADM template to use for GPO settings for VDI and that the RDC v6.0 client is recommended.

Using nLite you can easily build XP installations that are much smaller than your default install, not only in RAM usage but also in disk usage. With nLite you walk through a wizzard that helps you to disable unnecessary services, remove unwanted programs or accessories and remove unneeded drivers. Many drivers included in XP are not needed if you’re working with VDI desktops. The hardware will never change, apart from a VMware Tools update now and then. So, we can leave out all the drivers for other devices, except for USB. Leave USB in to be able to connect external devices into your VDI desktop.

 

Not only can you disable drivers, you can also included new drivers. To include the VMware drivers, open the windows.iso file you can find on your esx host in the /vmimages/tools-images directory. Extract the contents to a folder on your harddisk. In nLite you can now add the drivers from the “program files\VMware\VMware Tools\Drivers” directory. nLite scans the folders and lets you select the correct driver to include. For the VMware SCSI driver choose text-mode if asked. Remember, this only installs the drivers, not the VMware Tools !!! I bet it is possible to also include them in the image, but I haven’t researched this yet. So don’t forget to install them afterwards.

When working with nLite you have to think very carefully what the user has to be able to do with his VDI desktop. You want to disable as many unneeded parts as possible, but disabling one too many can make your desktop useless. After creating a new XP ISO with nLite be sure to do some real good testing if everything your user would want to do is also possible.

Playing with nLite eventually gave me a XP VDI desktop that runs with SP2 and only has 60Mb RAM in use, but this is only a first step, because the desktop can only surf the internet and isn’t running stuff like Office or Anti-Virus. There is still a long road ahead before I have the most optimal combination of enabling and disabling services, applications, drivers, etc. but I know now that nLite is a very valluable tool to build your VDI structure.

nLite is freeware and can be found here:  http://www.nliteos.com. nLite supports Windows 2000, XP x86/x64 and Windows 2003 x86/x64 in all languages. It needs  .Net FrameWork 2.0 in order to run.

For Vista there is vLite. Which can be found here: http://www.vlite.net/.