The SLOG - SimonLong/Blog

VMware Horizon View: New Technical White Papers

Simon Long — Sat, 18 May 2013 08:55:04 +0000

Over the past few week or so VMware has release some really useful technical white papers focused around VMware Horizon View. I just wanted to bring these to your attention in case you messed the announcements.

If you have an Horizon View environment, I would highly recommend you give these papers a read to ensure you are following all of the VMware's latest "Best Practices" that are appropriate for your environment.

My First Published Technical White Paper

Simon Long — Sat, 18 May 2013 08:54:22 +0000

Today my first official technical white paper got released on VMware.com – titled, Virtual Machine Graphics Acceleration Deployment Guide. It's been a long time coming. It was one of those papers where I could keep adding and adding to it.

The paper talks about the following topics:

Why 3D Matters for VMware Horizon View
Understanding the Differences Between Soft 3D/SVGA, vDGA and vSGA
Prerequisites
Application Requirements and Use Cases
vSGA Installation
vDGA Installation (Tech Preview)
VMware Horizon View Pool Configuration for vSGA
Performance Tuning Tips
Resource Monitoring
Troubleshooting

Hopefully it should cover everything you need to enable your Horizon View desktops for 3D rendering.

There are a number of other VMware Horizon View: New Technical White Papers that have been released recently that are well worth a read. Check.Them.Out

How Can I Run Multiple VMware Horizon View Clients At Once?

Simon Long — Wed, 15 May 2013 13:15:28 +0000

Something I get asked regularly is, "How Can I Run Multiple VMware Horizon View Clients At Once?", so I thought I'd just put a quick post out in the hope that in the future people will come across this post before having to ask. Quite often users would like to have multiple View sessions open at once on the screen or across screens. By default the Horizon View client only allows you to see a single View session at any one time. You can swap between multiple sessions, but you will still only be able to see a single session at any one time. This is how you can run multiple VMware Horizon View clients at once.

NOTE: I do not believe either of these two solutions are supported by VMware. They both work fine, but if you have issues, you will not get support.

Windows (XP/Vista/7/8)
To run multiple Horizon View Mac OS X Clients, you need to run the following command in Command Prompt:

C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware View\Client\bin\wswc.exe -standalone

If for some reason the path or the name of your Horizon View Client is different, adjust accordingly.

Mac OS X
To run multiple Horizon View Mac OS X Clients, you need to run the following command in Terminal:

open -n /Applications/VMware\ Horizon\ View\ Client.app

If for some reason the path or the name of your Horizon View Client is different, adjust accordingly.

vOpenData – Get Involved!!

Simon Long — Tue, 14 May 2013 13:03:49 +0000

A few weeks ago my RSS feeds were inundated with posts about vOpenData. I had decided to wait until the hype had died down a bit until I created a little reminder post to help keep the momentum going.

What is vOpenData?

vOpenData is an open community project that grew from the question "What is the average VMDK size for deployed virtual machines?" We wanted to create an open community database that is purely driven by users submitting their virtual infrastructure configurations. Leveraging the powerful virtualization community and applying simple analytics we are able to provide various trending statistics and data for virtualized environments. This is 100% community driven and the results will be available for everyone to view and hopefully you will contribute to the overall dataset!

Personally I think this is a great idea. The more people that anonymously share their stats, the better and more granular results will become available to us.

Below you can see some of the data that is available via the vOpenData website.

When talking to the guys who are running this (Ben Thomas and William Lam), they informed me that they will be adding many more dashboards over the coming months, opening up much more data than is currently available. If some of the data you are looking for is not currently available, send them a tweet with your thoughts and I'm sure they will try to accommodate you.

Some of data I am personally looking for is around VDI. Virtual desktop sizes, maybe Paging file sizes, those kind of things. It's this data that up until now has not been available to us. I've only been able to work with stats from environments I've worked on, or Industry Standards which I often think are made up…

So get sharing guys. The more people share, the more we will get back. For details on how to get involved, visit the vOpenData website

Make sure you follow vOpenData on twitter for the latest updates.

Seeing Double??

Simon Long — Mon, 13 May 2013 16:29:43 +0000

Just lately I've been fortunate enough to visit South Korea to see a customer. Whilst I was there I had a little spare time to see some of the sights of Korea.

One of the cool things I saw there was a something called Dual Play by LG .Below you can see a photo I took of Dual-Play.

As you can see, there is a different picture displayed on each screen. In this case there was a racing game being played, so it's not soo obvious. But take it from me, each of those two windows were displaying different images.

What's so cool about that I hear you ask…… Well lets take a step to the side….

Cool hey? Only one screen displaying two different screens. The screen you see will depend on which window you stand behind. Now my understanding of this technology, is that is similar to the technology used with 3D films and when you buy the product you actually buy glasses not little windows. Imagine being able to play two player Full-Screen COD using the same TV!! I wonder if they can take the technology further, I wonder if they could allow four, eight different screens off of one TV. The whole family could all watch something different at the same time.

Gotta love tech.

Pre-populate VMware Horizon Data Accounts With Documents

Simon Long — Thu, 02 May 2013 13:28:46 +0000

This is a little tip for anyone who is looking to pre-populate VMware Horizon Data with documents. Every user that is provisioned onto Horizon Data will automatically get these documents in their share. A common use case for this, is adding a "Getting Started" PDF document that explains how Horizon Data works, where everything is etc. You could also use this to share files to new users, company handbook, HR documents that sort of thing.

NOTE: The files are injected into the users folder as a post-create task. This means that any accounts that are already created will not receive these files, only new accounts will receive them.

HOW TO: Copy any files that you want to pre-populate into users folder into the following directory on EVERY Data node: /opt/zimbra/jetty/static

Once that is complete, all new users should see something similar to the following screenshot when accessing their newly created VMware Horizon Data account.

VMworld 2013 Public Voting is OPEN

Simon Long — Wed, 01 May 2013 12:45:55 +0000

and has been for a week or so now. I just want to shamelessly plug three sessions that I am involved in this year, so you can all go and vote for them! Don't forget to vote for all of the other great session that have been proposed. This is your chance to make VMworld 2013 what you want it to be.

#4815 Demistifying VMware Mirage – Tips and Tricks for Success

Wondering what Mirage really does, how it works, and how to successfully design and implement Mirage for your company or organization? VMware's Global Professional Services team will present a technical walk-though of a real-world end-to-end design & implementation of VMware Mirage. Hear first-hand how VMware Architects address technical and operational challenges, such as server and storage sizing, networking, and other critical VMware Mirage design elements. The team will show real-world architecture examples and share their lessons learned and best practices enabling you to be successful in deploying VMware Mirage.

#5249 PCoIP: Sizing For Success

Baffled by the PCoIP sizing minefield that accompanies an Horizon View deployment? No idea where to start? Join Chuck and Simon as they give an introduction to PCoIP, helping you understand important characteristics of the protocol that need to be considered when sizing for PCoIP. The session will then guide you through the critical steps required to optimize, measure and calculate PCoIP bandwidth requirements tailored to your environment.

#6045 EUC Experts Panel – Successful Implementations

Performance issues with virtual desktops? Experiencing issues with virtualized apps? Unsure how to scale your virtual desktop environment? What about Horizon Workspace and Mirage? Where do they fit into your desktop strategy? Come meet EUC Architects from Global Services Engineering as they answer your questions and explain their experience with designing and implementing some of the largest and most complex EUC environments to date. This helps customers realize the full potential of their EUC investment and is responsible for solving some of the thorniest problems and toughest design challenges. The panel includes experts in all of the Horizon Suite products, as well as critical infrastructure support elements for EUC such as Active Directory and anti-virus, storage solutions, networking, load balancing and many others. Come and ask the experts for help with some of the challenges you are facing and let them share their field experience and lessons learned to help you in all your EUC endeavors.

VMware Horizon View 5.2: Network Ports (External Design)

Simon Long — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 12:46:50 +0000

Following on from yesterdays VMware Horizon View 5.2: Network Ports (Internal Design) post, I present to you my second Horizon View 5.2 Networking Port diagram. This diagram is of an External Horizon View 5.2 design and includes Security Servers and all of the ports required for both the internal and external firewalls. I hope you find these digrams useful.

VMware Horizon View 5.2 Network Port Requirements (Internal Design)

VMware Horizon View 5.2: Network Ports (Internal Design)

Simon Long — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 12:24:29 +0000

I've been doing some work internally at VMware which I thought could be useful to the wider public, so I've decided to share this with you.

I've put together a couple of detailed diagrams that display the networking port requirements and directional traffic flow to the various component that make up an Horizon View 5.2 environment. Some of the diagram's I've seen documented in the past don't always show everything that is required and customers can often encounter issues when important information is missing.

I've decided to split these diagrams out into to separate posts. Here is the internal design Horizon View design.

VMware Horizon View 5.2 Network Port Requirements (Internal Design)

NorthWest England VMUG – Thursday, 25th April 2013

Simon Long — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 12:07:50 +0000

I just wanted to bring this to peoples attention.

Registration Now Open: Northwest England VMUG Meeting
Join us for the next Northwest England VMUG meeting taking place on Thursday, 25th April 2013.
Registration is now open and available to all VMUG members. This is a great opportunity to meet with your peers to discuss virtualization trends, best practices, and the latest technology!

Meeting Agenda

1PM – Welcome to VMUG
1:15PM – "VMware In The Real World" – SCC (A look at SCC VMware case studies and explore areas such as Management and AV that SCC are seeing demand and uptake in)
2PM – " vSphere in a nutshell" – Mike Laverick
2:45PM – Break – Refreshments
3PM – "VMware Horizon Workspace" – SCC (A look at the new EUC product range from VMware)
3:45PM – Break
4PM – " Zero to Colo – vCloud Director in my Lab" – Mike Laverick
4:45PM – vNews – a VMware rep TBC
5PM – Raffle and Close 5:05PM – vBeers Tiger Tiger (Printworks)

Looks like another great agenda and some great speakers. You can follow the official NW England VMUG Twitter profile for the latest VMUG news.