A load balancer is an integral component of (nearly) every VMware Horizon View design. Not only to distribute the connections among a number of connection or security servers, but also to provide high availability in case of a connection or security server failure. Without a load balancer, connection attempts will fail, if a connection or security server isn’t available. Craig Kilborn wrote an excellent article about the different possible designs of load balancing.

Logging is essential for troubleshooting. VMware Horizon View allows you to configure a SQL database for event logging, and I really recommend to configure the event logging database (I have seen some deployments without). Beside the event logging database, it’s a great idea to configure a secondary log destination. With a event logging database, and logs sent to a syslog, you have two independent log destinations. To configure a syslog destination, login to the Horizon View admin portal and go to “View Configuration > Event Configuration”.

Generating a certificate signing request (CSR) is the first step towards a signed certificate. The requests is generated with the applicants private key and consists of the public key, a name and optional attributes. To generate a CSR, you can use tools like OpenSSL on a Linux box, or sometimes the application itself can generate a CSR. But if you have a Windows box, you don’t have OpenSSL by default. And it’s unhandy to install something just for a single CSR.

Moving VMs from an old cluster with old ESXi hosts to a new cluster with new hosts can be so easy, even if the clusters doesn’t share any storage. A PowerCLI one-liner or the Web Client allow you to migrate VMs between hosts and datastores, while the VMs are running. This enhancement was added with vSphere 5.1. I’m often suprised how many customers doesn’t know this feature, just because they are still using the old vSphere C# client.

Some day ago, I installed a new Exchange 2013 CU11 for some test ins my lab. Nothing fancy, just a single server deployment on a Windows Server 2012 R2 VM. I deployed this Windows Server from a template, which was updated with the latest Windows Patches and WMF some days ago. The Exchange setup went smooth. I updated the SSL certificates and the internal and external URLs for the virtual directories.

IPv6 is not really new. According to Google, 10% of all users that access Google, do this over an IPv6 connection (Source). My blog is also accessible over IPv6 since its start in January 2014 (and since January 2016 only over HTTPS - thanks to Let’s Encrypt!). When I talk with customers about IPv6, I often hear things like “Oh, we had to disable it. Too much problems!” or “We had to disable it.

Disclaimer: Thanks to ALE Deutschland GmbH, the german subsidiary of Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, for loaning me two OmniSwitch 6450 switches. Who’s Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise? I’m quite sure that you know Alcatel-Lucent, a leading vendor for telecommunication and networking equipment. But do you know Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise (ALE)? In April 2015, Nokia placed an offer to buy Alcatel-Lucent for ~ 15 billion euro. Six months before, in October 2014, Alcatel-Lucent sold his enterprise business to China Huaxin.

I’m using Veeam Backup & Replication (currently 8.0 Update 3) in my lab environment to backup some of my VMs to a HP StoreOnce VSA. The VMs reside in a NFS datastore on a Synology DS414slim NAS, the StoreOnce VSA is located in a local datastore (RAID 5 with SAS disks) on one of my ESXi hosts. The Veeam backup server is a VM and it’s also the Veeam Backup Proxy.

Shrinking a big database on a Microsoft SQL Server can take some time. And it’s one of those tasks, where you wont get a status until it’s finished. I really hate this… But this small T-SQL query can help: SELECT percent_complete, dateadd(second,estimated_completion_time/ 1000, getdate()) as est_completion_time FROM sys.dm_exec_requests WHERE command = 'DbccFilesCompact' Simply open a new query windows, paste the query into the query windows and execute the query. The query outputs the progress in percent and the estimated completion time.

On December 8, 2015, VMware released VMware ESXi 5.5 patch ESXi550-201512001 (2135410). This patch is known as U3b and it contains general and security fixes, nothing special. Usually, you would install this update without notice. But this time, you should better take a look into the release notes of ESXi 5.5 U3b, before you install this update. This is taken from the release notes: Note: In your vSphere environment, you need to update vCenter Server to vCenter Server 5.