Plain Virtualization

With the announcement of Horizon 6.1.1 release , there are some new features added to Horizon solution.  Of the few, one of them is Application Remoting which now support over HTML5 browser. I have that testing since Horizon 6.1 in a technical preview and was not able to show it.  With this release, it is now official so I shall go through some of the screenshot how this was done. The setup is all similar is no complicated steps just an installation of an .exe binary on top of latest View 6.1 agent and the HTML access binary on the connection server. After which you have the freedom of choice to use a Horizon Client or a HTML5 to access your desktop as well as Applications remoting.  The best part of this is there is no plugin needed for browser this not just keep the browser clean from any crashes which can be resulted as well as messing up browser performance and behaviour. Using the Horizon Client this time, there are several improvement.  Remember when I...

Recently during an outage of my host during to hardware issue in my home lab where my vCenter 6.0 sit on it, resulted some strange behaviour on my View Connection Server 6.1.  I encounter the below error message: When I go to my Horizon View Dashboard, it looks fine. When I try to remove the vCenter entry under the Server options and adding it back I end up with another error when trying to add the View Composer. However this is not related to the strange behaviour above.  But rather this is due to my login did not contain a domain\username but instead of use just username . Back to the strange behaviour.  It seems my connection to my vCenter via Connection Server has a sudden slowness and the certificate seems to be corrupted.  I tried to find a solution to replace the self-signed (in my case) certificate on my View Connection Server however in vain.  I tried removing the vCenter and re-adding it back, that does not help. So I chanced upon some ...

With the announcement and also from the datasheet , it seems to be pretty lots of functionalities been added.  However there are some critical ones that are more appealing and wanting to see approvement or resolution to those who are already using since vSphere 4 and prior till today which are not make known to many. Storage There were many discussion over storage UNMAP via thin provisioning and many called it a "myth".  This was also discussed heavily in our Facebook VMUG - ASEAN group.  This was due to many changes since VMFS3 to till VMFS5.  Cody wrote a long history of what are the changes for those who have missed out here . A KB was also release and this create some discussion VMFS3 with different block size would benefit thin provision so to speak before vSphere 5.0 Update 1.  Sadly after which, all UNMAP was not possible via GUI or automatically other than via command line or script. I try to ask internally as well and luckily Cormac with his f...

NUMA is always a very interesting topic when in design and operation in virtualization space.  We need to understand it so we can size a proper VM more effectively and efficiently for application to perform at its optimum. To understand what is NUMA and how it works, a very good article to read will be from here .  Mathias has explained this in a very simple terms with good pictures that I do not have to reinvent.  How I wish I have this article back then. Starting from ESX 3.5, NUMA was made aware to ESX servers.  Allowing for memory locality via a NUMA node concept.  This helps address memory locality performance. In vSphere 4.1, wide-VM was introduce this was due to VM been allocating more vCPUs than the physical cores per CPU (larger than a NUMA node).  Check out Frank's post . In vSphere 5.0, vNUMA was introduced to improve the performance of the CPU scheduling having VM to be exposed to the physical NUMA architecture.  Understanding ho...

With many new start ups from storage arrays, converged, hyper-converged to software defined storage (SDS), many users starts to have lots of choice to make. Recently encountering many questions on which should they choose and which is better.  However there is no straight answer as there are just too many choices to choose from just like in a supermarket.  In the end, some may choose one that advertise the best and create the best reminder in your mind.  To be truth, you will not buy and replaced the rest, but rather some have a hybrid environment for some reasons which we will go through later. With several asks and questions, I like to give some guideline when deciding.  Here I will do my best to start with no bias towards any technology and this is my personal opinion and may not be the same with others. 1.  Ease of management: A big word often misused by marketing I would say.  Assess it and ask yourself do you have a team to manage different comp...

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...

Just some sharing that I chanced upon. This might be most useful for those who are building their demo labs when you try to nested environment or simulate your disk as Flash when it is actually magnetic disk (MD). It is also applicable where your Flash Disk/SSD is detected as a normal MD but you need to mark is as Flash disk or revert it when needed. This is typically very true in a Virtual SAN (VSAN) environment.  When you need for a disk group with a minimum of at least one SSD. If you refer to our KB , you might have to go through a list of commands.  However in vSphere 6.0, the web client has the function to do it via the GUI. Below is a screenshot taken from my home lab.  My ESXi server has a normal SATA disk and a SSD disk.  So upon selecting either of them the icon will change to allow you to change it.  Technically you can even build a all Flash VSAN without having to own a VSAN license only different is the read and write ratio remain the same...