Virtually Jason

So, I implemented Persona Management a few months ago and figured that I’d write a quick followup with my experiences since then.  As a technology, it strikes me as both really cool and a little difficult.  It deals with the persistency issues that you would typically enable Roaming Profiles to resolve, and  I haven’t seen any of the profile corruption issues in Persona Management for which Roaming Profiles are infamous.  So, that’s a plus.  It also does what it’s supposed to do, which isn’t always a given when you’re working with relatively new technologies.  That said, there are some issues that it seems to have introduced into this environment. 1) Rapidly logging back in after logging out causes a hung logon. 2) Loopback processing applied logon scripts are ignored after the initial Persona is created. The rapid logoff/logon issue doesn’t strike me as vital.  I’d certainly like to fix it, but that’s a fringe case and it seems to be self-correc...

One of my customers has been trying to figure out how they are going to deal with printer assignment in their View environment.  In truly stateless desktops (without Persona Management, even), you have to completely depend on external printer assignments, either through a logon script or through Active Directory.  I prototyped both solutions for this customer.  In order to minimize our logon times, we preinstalled our printer drivers in the parent image (for both tests). We found that a normal Windows 7 logon onto a stateless desktop (where it’s always the first logon and so has to create a local profile and apply group policy) takes about 20 seconds from the time the user hits “connect”.  Using Group Policy to distribute printers increased that logon time to about 45 seconds… which was a bit too much for my liking.  Using a logon script, on the other hand, does not delay the logon process (even if the printers are not actually present immediately upon log...

I feel silly linking to the Lone Sysadmin, as if my blog might get readership that his doesn’t, but I recently had to configure an MSSQL 2008 server for VCenter  for one of my customers, and his article on that subject was amazing.  I am by no means a DBA, but I feel that, by following his process, I’ve configured a server that a real DBA might look at and not immediately break down with tears of frustration.  In case any of you have missed it, it’s an excellent read and seems to result in a very robust configuration.

One of my customers recently had a fairly unique issue.  It was unique enough that I thought that it would make an interesting write up, just in case anyone sees something similar in their own environment.  We haven’t been able to track down root cause, but what ended up happening is all of the pointer VMDK files on a specific LUN were deleted.  The –flat.vmdk files were still there, but none of the <VM>.vmdk files were present.  This meant that no VM on that LUN could power on, as they were all throwing an error “File <unspecified filename> was not found”.  That error message is slightly better than “An unspecified error occurred”, but only just barely. This customer is still on ESX 4.0 and, as you’d guess, they’re pretty far out of date as far as patches go.  In addition, one of the fibre ports on their switch was flapping, causing some intermittent storage access issues.  Neither of those facts sounds like a cause of the issue that...

One of my customers recently asked that I make the View client’s CD-Rom accessible to the virtual desktop through a PCoIP session.  While that is, strictly speaking, not possible, the customer was adamant.  After much discussion, I eventually determined to use a network drive mapping on the VDI Desktop to the Client machine’s CD-Rom.  This doesn’t allow the customer to listen to audio CDs, however it does allow the customer to copy files off of their CDs and generally perform work functions.  In order to accomplish this, I decided to use a simple logon script that would pull the client’s identification. Some poking around on google pointed me at the %viewclient_ip_address% environment variable, so I wrote up a quick test script (after configuring a share for my client’s CD-Rom called “CD”) that added the drive mapping.  I executed it and it ran flawlessly, so I set that as a logon script and immediately forgot about it as I went on to work on other, more pres...

This is probably going to be a relatively short one.  Here we are, 4 years after the initial release of Server 2008.  4 years after the initial implementation of KMS licensing… and I’m still coming across all sorts of confusion about how it works and how to use it.  I’m tired of seeing unintentional rogue KMS servers pop up on client networks, and so I’m going to rehash what many other people have already covered: how KMS licensing differs from Volume License Keys.  They are not at all the same, and if you try to use a KMS license key the way you would have used a VLK, your environment is going to get messed up. First, here’s some supposition about why the change happened.  When someone’s VLK leaked into the wild, it was basically a gravy train for every pirate who knew how to use google.  Since, by its very nature, a VLK was designed to allow many systems to activate, it meant that many pirate systems would be activated.  At best, Microsoft could k...

View Persona Management is a new feature to View, as of version 5.0.  People have had some difficulties in getting it up and running, and I am most certainly included in that list.  After more work than I’d care to admit (and several calls to VMware), we’ve gotten it up and running.  Now that I’ve seen it in action, all that I can say is “wow”.  It was a painful process to get it to where we are now, but now that it’s running it’s working really well and has satisfied my customer’s user customization needs spectacularly.  Here’s my implementation notes, to hopefully make my (and others’) future deployments go more smoothly. First, a brief overview of what Persona Management is, for the uninitiated (if you already know, feel free to skip this and the next paragraph).  Speaking plainly, Persona Management is another option instead of Windows Roaming Profiles.  It does have a few very important distinctions that make it work much better than Roaming Pr...