Virtually Jason

One of my customers uses the Sophos UTM virtual appliance as a firewall/router.  It was originally set up as an Astaro version 8 virtual appliance and has been upgraded in place since then.  When that appliance was first made available, it used the Flexible network adapter by default, although the recommendation now is to use vmxnet3 for better performance.  Unfortunately, during the upgrade process, this change never went into place. We’re trying to help this customer to resolve some performance problems and have identified that network adapter type as a potential bottleneck in their environment.  Before changing such a vital piece of a live environment, I decided to prototype it in the lab.  It turns out that Sophos no longer provides the virtual appliance , instead providing an ISO to install the software onto a VMware virtual machine.  No problem, I thought, and so I created the VM in my lab, aiming to match the appliance’s configuration settings. ...

When planning a VDI deployment, we all know that it’s important to define your use cases.  VMware’s methodology defines three main categories for these use cases: Task Worker, Knowledge Worker and Power User.  I see a lot of confusion in the field though – these are not use cases themselves.  I have yet to find an organization that can neatly divide their workforce into three use cases.  Instead, those categories are really just shorthand to allow us to roughly describe the resources that are required by the use case. Most environments will have several Task Worker use cases.  There might be a Call Center Task Worker use case, a Data Entry Clerk Task Worker use case and a Secretary Task Worker use case, all within the same organization.  This is perfectly normal, as “Task Worker” really means that the use case employs a very limited set of applications and does not require many resources.  So, how do you actually define a use case then? A us...

When working with VMware View (or any VDI solution for that matter), you’ll eventually have to deal with certificates.  Hopefully your organization has a skilled web or security team who can help you install the certificate onto the Connection Servers and Security Servers… but I find that that’s not usually the case.  Usually, someone either just downloads the certificate from GoDaddy (or whatever authority they use) or gives me the credentials so that I can download it myself. The problem is, what you download from GoDaddy isn’t going to work, at least not by itself.  There basically two parts of a certificate: the public key and the private key.  When you go to GoDaddy and launch their interface and download your certificate, you’re downloading the public key (and any intermediate certificates that are required to establish a chain of trust).  In order to install and use that certificate, you’ll need to provide the corresponding private key (which was used i...

I was working with one of my ProfileUnity customers and they decided that they wanted to change the file server for their user profile repository.  This path gets used in a lot of different places of a configuration.  The easiest way to change it in the GUI is to just create a new configuration (using the wizard) and specify the new file server.  In this case, that wasn’t really an option as they had a very developed configuration with a lot of customized settings that we didn’t want to recreate.  Fortunately, there’s a nice easy work around to make such changes. From the main ProfileUnity page, just download your configuration.  Instead of saving it as an .ini (like you would when transferring it into your domain\netlogin\ProfileUnity folder, export it as a .json file.  This .json file is ultimately just a text file… which means that you can open it up in your text editor of choice and use “find and replace” to great effect. When doing this, bear in mi...

I recently had the chance to do some testing with PernixData ’s vSphere solution and it was very educational.  It worked great, doing exactly what it was supposed to do… and it also got me thinking about the nature of storage caching. For just about ever, caching has been the technique that allows storage devices to provide the blazing performance that we all demand.  Monolithic SANs always have some amount of cache on their controllers.  What exactly does that cache do?  As the name implies, it caches data.  On those SANs, we would typically assign some amount of read cache and some amount of write cache (I’ve typically biased my vSphere storage devices heavily towards write cache, but opinions vary).  When a write request comes in, it is very quickly written to that cache and the acknowledgement is sent to the device that is performing the write.  The SAN’s job is then to destage the data from the cache onto the disks for long term storage, whic...

I was deploying Liquidware Labs ProfileUnity for a customer last week and we came across an interesting bug that I wanted to make a quick note of.  It's a cool tool for managing the general user experience; pretty much everything that lives in the user's profile.  It largely obviates the need for using the Group Policy editor and wading through the pages and pages of GPO settings that can apply to desktops by putting many of the most common settings into a much easier interface. One of the things that you can configure with ProfileUnity is shortcuts.  They can go on the Desktop or the Start Menu or any of the other places that you might want a shortcut to sit, and you can point them at pretty much anything that you'd like a shortcut to point at.  Great!  It's much easier to manage through their interface, as they allow you to filter who gets what shortcut and can automatically create them based on AD Group membership, etc.  It's great!  We did run in...

If you've looked at the scripts that I've written, you may have noticed that I use a fairly simple bit of syntax whenever I need to access a single property from all objects in an array (in PowerShell).  I just wrote that sentence and even I'm not entirely sure what it means, so I'd better use an example.  Try this: $events = get-eventlog -newest 10 $events.source What output did you see?  If you saw a list of 10 sources, congratulations, your PowerShell is at least version 3!  If you saw no output, then you should really update your PowerShell.  This is the functionality that I mean - the ability to easily generate an array of a single Property (in this case, Source) from an array of objects. I bring this up because that functionality is super useful.  For example, I was recently writing a script for a customer that involved analyzing a bunch of AD Users and I needed to manipulate a single Property and then select users based on that Property (I'm ...