Virtually Jason

A customer recently asked me how to easily check their environment for high CPU Ready metrics.  Given that I don't know of an easy way to quickly look through the whole environment by the GUI, I decided to pull out PowerCLI and see what I could put together. For those who don't know, CPU Ready records the time that a VM spends (during a given interval) ready for CPU time, but no physical CPU is available.  Basically, it reports on CPU contention.  There will always be small amounts of CPU Ready - that just reflects the time that it takes a CPU to react to an OS's request to compute.  In general, CPU Ready times averaging below 5% of your polling interval should be completely unnoticeable.  Between 5% and 10%, delays become noticeable, and beyond 10% they are seriously problematic. Those rules for interpreting CPU ready are all based on percentage of a time interval, but the metric that is actually recorded is the number of milliseconds spent ...

If you’ve ever set up a View Security Server for external access, you’ve probably invested a fair amount of your time looking at firewall port requirements.  I sure did.  And then, after all that time, I still ended up falling back on trial and error, for at least a little bit.  Rather than repeating that process (and to hopefully help others), I’m putting together a quick post with my notes.  This engagement is using vShield and is securing the Security Servers with these rules, preventing both incoming and outgoing traffic (except for what is explicitly allowed). First, there is an excellent list of general network portsrequired for VMware products , which can give you a good place to begin.  There’s a more detailed list of View Network Port Requirements  as well, which is an even better place to begin (but, if you’re working with other VMware products, the general list is a good resource to have available). Unfortunately, as I’ve mentioned, tha...

We’re working on remote access for a View solution at one of my customers right now.  We’ve got a pair of external user Connection Brokers, each partnered with a Security Server.  We’ve also got an F5 Big-IP load balancer sitting in front of the Security Servers, giving them some protection from the big bad ‘net and, more importantly, providing load balancing services.  We found that the process was a bit more circumspect than I had expected, involving instructions from several documents, so I’m consolidating our process here.   At first, we followed the instructions from the F5 View Deployment Guide , which got us really close to what we needed.  It’s worth noting that the “External URL” and “PCoIP External URL” fields should be the public address of the F5, even though the document uses an internal address in its examples. We were able to connect to the system by our public name and it presented the list of desktops to our test account.  Howev...

I’ve been working with Unidesk lately, as well as with the vSphere PowerCLI .  One of my customers has also been having an intermittent issue where they cannot browse their datastores (it just sticks at “Searching Datastore…” until they lose patience and close the window).  All of this has gotten me thinking about the relationship between vCenter and the ESXi hosts.  When we send a command to vCenter, such as creating a new VM, we all know that vCenter is simply relaying that command to one of its ESXi hosts, which does the actual work.  Same thing with file copies through the Datastore Browser, and in fact even reading the datastores through that same tool. How do we, as administrators, know which ESXi Host vCenter is using as its “workhorse”?  In a clustered environment, it’s really very unclear.  It turns out that, if that workhorse ESXi host is having an issue, it may prevent a lot of those basic vCenter functions from working (such as the aforem...

One of my customers deleted their Unidesk desktops from the View Administrator again and, once again, the system happily deleted a layer from the CachePoint.  This causes a problem in that you can no longer build desktops on that CachePoint that use that Layer (read that linked older post if you want more detail about that situation).  Last time this happened, we knew which Layer was affected because it was a rarely assigned application, but this time we didn’t have any such indicator.  We went through a discovery process this time that we didn’t go through last time and we came up with a far easier solution this time, so here’s the scoop. First, we had to figure out which Layer was affected.  To do so, I used the Datastore Browser in the vSphere Client.  I knew which CachePoint was missing the Layer, for that CachePoint was the one that was failing to build out the desktops.  I simply Browsed the datastore that that CachePoint manages, as well as th...

One of my customers has been having an intermittent issue with their Windows 7 VDI Desktops.  Occasionally after they update the Operating System, when the desktops boot back up they fail to use their NICs.  The NIC is still attached to the VM and is still on the right network, but Windows fails to recognize it (it doesn’t get a DHCP address and, in fact, registers within the OS as being physically disconnected from the network).  Restarting the desktop doesn’t help, reinstalling drivers doesn’t help (we’re using the VMXNET3 network adapter, for those who are interested).  Removing the adapter from Windows seems to be the key to getting the desktop back online.  We’ve gotten desktops back online by removing the adapter from Device Manager and then scanning for hardware changes (and rebooting).  We’ve also removed the NIC from the VM (with the VM shut down) and replaced it; that’s also alleviated the issue. Unfortunately, those steps just alleviate the...

Andre Leibovici has posted an interesting article at myvirtualcloud.net about direct PCoIP connections to VDI Desktops .  Apparently, VMware is testing this ability right now and is considering making it generally available; I find this fascinating! Andre points out a couple of use cases that seem largely focused on the small business space.  The use case that I’m most interested in is the “Cloud Provisioning” option that he mentions.  I’m interested in that because, near as I can tell, “Cloud Provisioning” really just means “desktops that are not provisioned or managed by View”.  That is exciting because it might open the doors for deeper 3 rd party integration or whole 3 rd party connection brokering for PCoIP (like the late Panologic did with RDP sessions). My favorite aspect of Panologic’s solution was how seamless it was, from the user perspective.  Since the VDI desktop could be associated with the Pano device, the RDP session was established a...