Plain Virtualization

With Broadcom acquisition of VMware completing in 22nd Nov, there have been lots of assumption made by many sources what will become of the business direction. Here are some of the updates that are publicly announced if you have not catch up on the news. To start with, VMware is now known as VMware by Broadcom and all originally VMware software will remain to be branded under VMware. The first announcement 27th November, Carbon Black is  now  an autonomous unit within Broadcom. In my opinion this is good news. I have seen not much integration on Carbon Black ever since acquired by VMware so with that move, it allows Carbon Black to innovate and do what they do best in Cyber security landscape. Next from the acquisition completion, there are many speculation on after the acquisition what will end up of End User Computing? With the  announcement  on 8th December, The End User Computing (EUC) division will be a diverse business. With that understanding, EUC division wi...

Two years ago, VMware manage to have VMware Boxer mail mobile client getting certificate for NIAP. It was the first mobile email client that has gotten this type of certification. Till date it is still the only mobile email client. This shows the security standard that Boxer has adhere to definitely isn't little. Having companied customer down to VMware Headquarters in Palo Alto in August and manage to know that VMware Horizon 8 has also achieved the same standard for NIAP in July 2023. This mark VMware Horizon as the first VDI solution to have met such standard and till date the only VDI solution in the market as well. Since VDI is often use as a main use case as a security solution to safe guard against IP thief and other use cases related, that a user requires full desktop access yet controls across the desktop are implemented, achieving this standard of certification is definitely proof VMware Horizon security standard. Please check out NAIP website  here  for the list of ...

The long-awaited version for App Volumes has been released. For those who remember App Volume 3.0, it was taken down by VMware within a week (if I remembered correctly). It was a version that cannot be in placed upgrade and it was a new architecture completely. It was a right move that VMware removed it and with version 4.0. This wasn't the case. In place upgrade was possible and co-existence of version 2.x and 4.x can be achieved. To list a few of the new features below: Increase the number and speed of attachments through a new packaging  and organizing the lifecycle of the Windows apps Able to manage Single Application or Group of Applications in a single stack Enable SSL encryption for SQL server AppStack Migration Tool: use for migrating App Volumes 2.18 to App Volumes 4.0 Refer to this video for What's New in VMware App Volumes 4.0. Mastering App Volumes Activity path here .

Been setting up POC environment for customer and this time wrong got involve with using Nvidia GRID. Encounter some setup steps that are missing from nVidia Deployment guide. In fact, every single setup guide uses the nVidia K1 & K2 card as a reference and those cards have EOA. Here will share with you if you are using any of the newer cards e.g. M60, M6, M10, etc. Here are some resources you should refer to when setting GRID on Horizon 7.x. Register an account on nVidia to download the vibs for ESXi and nVidia License server and Nvidia Driver for Windows OS. Deploying Hardware-Accelerated Graphics with Horizon 7 GIRD Virtual GPU I love to use this guide as a reference to what profile is available for each card type. In a summary what needs to be done on the master image: Install VMware tools Install Horizon View Direct-Connect agent (you know why this needed later) Shutdown VM Edit VM settings, add shared PCI device, select your GRID profile Take a snapshot (in...

Catch up with all these articles with the announcement page. Day 1 VMware Cloud on AWS It is now LIVE! https://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vmw-newsfeed.VMware-and-AWS-Announce-Initial-Availability-of-VMware-Cloud-on-AWS.2184706.html AppDefense Beyond what NSX provide you with micro-segmentation, today with AppDefense you will be able to identify and realize misbehavior in your VM and action on them if you have NSX for distributed enforcement. https://blogs.vmware.com/networkvirtualization/2017/08/introducing-vmware-appdefense-expanding-beyond-micro-segmentation-threat-detection-response.html NSX-T 2.0 Extension of supporting VM and containers alike and AWS workloads.  Ability to support vSphere and KVM. https://blogs.vmware.com/networkvirtualization/2017/08/nsx-t-2-0.html/ OpenStack 4.0 Multiple vCenter Servers and containers support is one of the key release feature. https://blogs.vmware.com/openstack/vmware-integrated-openstack-4-0/ Simplified ...

There are some confusion out there on VMware Horizon 6 Bundle.  You can take a look at the available products that are in Horizon Standard, Advanced and Enterprise Edition https://www.vmware.com/products/horizon-view/compare. Here we will use the Horizon Enterprise bundle as an example as the products which are available in the Advanced Edition will be what we will be going through. All editions from the bundle except Horizon Standard (only CCU) comes in both Named Users (NU) and Concurrent Users (CCU) licensing.  However there are products in the bundle that has no way in doing a CCU licensing even if you have purchase the CCU licensing.  This is because the way it is used is an active connections or active user and not possible to be a concurrent connection method. Let's take for example: Horizon View, this can be in NU or CCU.  Reason is simple you can have a fixed number of users who will always access the virtual desktops, that will help with a NU licensin...

In my home lab, I do not have any redundancy since it for testing purpose and in such, I encounter a power failure and resulted in my Horizon Connection server to be absent. Upon recovery of powering up again, one of the replica end up lost link with the database.  In my vSphere Web Client, I see a replica (orphaned).  I was able to delete the replica folder but the entry still stay in the vSphere Web Client inventory tree (that applies the same to vSphere Client). By the way I am running Horizon View 6.1 and this solution found in the KB still works. I didn't manage to capture my screenshot and found the below similar.  You will see the same on the web client.  Do note that the name of the replica will look like "replica-d0d123123c-f3j2-... (orphaned)".  Do note the actual name does not contain "(orphaned)".  DO NOT include when using the commands below. source: http://www.vladan.fr The command in the KB states and this was the confusion I h...

Finally upgrade my home lab with vSphere 6.0 and Horizon 6.1.  Have to perform a demonstration to my customer how to assign Thinapp easily via the Horizon View Admin portal.  Guess what, luck never on my side and hit with lots of issues. This issue comes with lots of testing.  The error I encounter after assignment was HRESULT hr = 0×80070005. Access is denied .  Doing a few Google didn't bring me nowhere.  Assignment installation failed. Let me just walk through what I have done: Package a few Thinapp packages with editing of Package.ini mainly the MSI settings since I am doing a assignment from Horizon View Admin Portal.  Read more here . Place them in a file share with permission to VDI users (yes make sure the VDI users can access those folders) In Horizon View Admin portal, scan the repository for the Thinapp, make sure the .msi and .exe and .dat (if you are streaming and app is too big to build into .exe file) in the same folder in the reposi...

The Scenario ABC company has a remote office and connection back to HQ is not very possible due to bandwidth.  Applications used by the users at the remote office must not have any access to the server directly for security reason and manageability.  The second requirement is the server that serves the applications is not joined to Active Directory. With the release of Horizon View 5.2, we were able to use View Direct Connection without a Connection server or a broker with or without Active Directory.  With this we are able to meet some of the requirements above.  This is currently only possible on VMware Horizon View, Citrix XenDesktop does not have this feature. With the release of VMware Horizon 6, it comes with Application Remoting, this not only allow a RDSH Desktop but now you can provide Application Remoting (Application Presentation similar to Citrix Xenapp).  With this add on feature and the Direct-Connection, this makes Application Remoting witho...

If you have not read about what was on Day 1 check out here .  There ain't much announcement on solutions here on the second day.  There are quite a lot of announcements on EUC space and that you can read it here .  There are also mentions of CloudVolumes which was recently acquired by VMware just last week, a few partnership with Google and nVidia on Chromebooks and Horizon DaaS which lightly further expansion from the acquisition done on Desktone . Also VMware has joined as a Gold Partner in the Open Compute Project as reported by AMAX . With VMware been the first partner of SAP with AirWatch and SAP Mobile Secure into the mobility space on security and experience stated here . On vCloud Air, there is on demand which was previously mentioned and as well as vCloud Air  Object Storage offering.  Check out all the new announcement by Bill Fathers. To sum it all, the second focus much on the EUC and mostly partnership betwee day 1 and 2.  If you ar...

There are all the articles available and most of them are on Horizon View 5.2 with Lync 2013.  However these are still valid there is nothing changes.  One great article which I refer to when doing my Proof of Concept (POC) with my customer is here .  The document that the article refers to is a must read and its pretty clear.  But some confusion that came to my mind when doing so here are some of questions you might have. On the endpoint, it has to be a physical machine running Windows which can be 32 bit or 64 bit.  The LyncVDI plugin needs to be the same bit level as the Office (where Lync is usually installed with) or the Standalone Lync that is installed in the virtual desktop. Note: Do not install Lync Client on the end points where Lync VDI plugin is installed.  And no USB redirection should be done for the camera or audio device which will be used by Lync for video and audio. On the end point, you will need three things: Horizon View Clie...

On 25th Jun 2014, VMware has announced the availability of Horizon Mirage 5.0.  This marks another milestone to complete the full Horizon 6 release (shorting vC Ops 6 for View). Key features in my opinions: 1) The interesting features other than the support of Windows 8.1, is the cross migration between 32 bits and 64 bits OS.  A summary below: Windows XP 32 bits to Windows 7 32 bits & 64 bits Windows Vista 32 bits to Windows 7 32 bits & 64 bits Windows Vista 64 bits to Windows 7 64 bits Windows 7 32 bits to Windows 8.1 32 bits & 64 bits Windows 7 64 bits to Windows 8.1 64 bits 2) The next is one of the chore I find is the in place upgrade.  You no longer have to follow the old upgrade process by uninstalling the previous version followed by installing again as stated in the KB .  Just by clicking the Horizon 5.0 setup files, it will detect and upgrade accordingly and shutting down any services if required (prompts are provided to go ahe...

Having to release a newer version of Horizon Mirage from 4.2 to 4.3, there are some new features and with some limitations as well. Here is the release note for Horizon Mirage 4.3. You can see that in the What's New section, Horizon Mirage can now manage Persistent desktop from Horizon View.  This was not support for any virtual desktop previously as the dedup functions uses up all the CPU cycle and resulted a over demand on the ESX server.  In this release it is now only supporting full clone desktops.  You will see new upload policy setting as show below: You can see that you can also disable client end throttling and choose that end point for this policy is optimize for LAN environment. The next big feature is apply app layer during Windows 7 migration from Windows XP.  Previously only a base layer can be applied for migration and subsequently any new app layer/s need to be applied separately and this result some disruption to the user.  With this...

With much great work to further improve VMware Horizon Mirage, VMware has release version 4.2 which is mentioned here . Some of the great improvement here include Vista support for Disaster Recovery, hardware migration and Windows 7 migration from Windows Vista. Added other than bitdefender encryption, now Sophos 5.5 endpoint encryption is also supported. To add further, a web console for help desk to do troubleshooting is now found instead of relying on MMC. Though this release did not have any support for Windows 8 which means support for USMT version 5 is yet to be included.   I hope to see more improvements such as these above soon. I will do an article on Mirage 4.2 soon. See the release note here . Documentation can be located here . Download the binary here .

The announcement for Horizon Suite for the End User Computing (EUC) solution has been announced on 20th Feb 2013.  The release binary will be available in 4th March 2013.  You can read about here . I am very excited with this launch as it consists of 3 major components out of this suite.  Each with its own used cases and all combined to provide a new era of End User Computing experience.  You can see an overview video below: Horizon Suite If you remember during the VMworld 2011, there was two Projects announced with it which was part of EUC, Project Octopus and Project Appblast. With the announcement for Horizon Suite, you will know find there are this components namely Horizon Workspace, Horizon View, Horizon Mirage. To see a whole integration of Horizon Suite nicely done, take a look at the demo below by Andre Leibovici: Horizon Suite Demo Horizon Workspace incorporated two solutions which was once known as Horizon App Manager and also the Pro...