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A customer notified me, that he observed an issue with the space reclamation on two automated desktop pools with linked clones. His environment is based on Horizon View 6.2.1 and vSphere 5.5U3. The error was logged in the View Administrator and the vSphere (Web) Client. In the View Administrator, the following error was visible:

"Failed to perform space reclamation on machine COMPUTER NAME in Pool POOL NAME"

VMware vSphere 6 is now an year old and it was time to update my lab to vSphere 6. The update went smooth, and everything has worked as expected. Some days later, I updated the master VM of a small automated desktop pool. I’m using VMware Horizon 6.2.1 in my lab to deploy a small number of Windows 8.1 VMs for tests, administration etc. The recompose of the pool failed during the guest customization.

Today I saw an interesting behaviour of two Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise OmniSwitch 6450. Both switches has been configured as a stack, but one of the switches showed a flashing ID after the startup, and the stack was not formed. While I checked the logs and the status of the stack, I noticed that the slot number was incorrect. Furthermore the status showed “INC-LIC”.

-> show stack topology
                                         Link A  Link A          Link B  Link B
NI      Role      State   Saved  Link A  Remote  Remote  Link B  Remote  Remote
                          Slot   State   NI      Port    State   NI      Port
----+-----------+--------+------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------
   1 PRIMARY     RUNNING    1    UP       1001   StackB  DOWN        0        0
1001 PASS-THRU   INC-LIC    2    DOWN        0        0  UP          1   StackA

-> show log swlog
<snip>
THU MAR 03 13:07:29 2016  STACK-MANAGER    info == SM == Stack Port A Status Changed: DOWN
THU MAR 03 13:07:29 2016  STACK-MANAGER    info == SM == NI 0 down notification sent to LAG
THU MAR 03 13:08:41 2016  STACK-MANAGER    info == SM == Stack Port A Status Changed: UP
THU MAR 03 13:08:41 2016  STACK-MANAGER    info == SM == Stack Port A MAC Frames TX/RX Enabled
THU MAR 03 13:08:42 2016  STACK-MANAGER    info  Retaining Module Id for slot 2 unit 0 as 1
THU MAR 03 13:08:46 2016  STACK-MANAGER    info == SM == An element enters passthru mode (incompatible license)
<snip>

According to the stack status and the switch logs, there seems to be a problem with the licenses. So I checked the installed licenses on both switches. On switch showed Metro license:

Yesterday I did an upgrade of my vCenter Server Appliance 5.5 U3 to 6.0 U1. This was the first step to update my lab infrastructure to vSphere 6.0. A bit late, but better late than never. The update of the VCSA itself went smooth. No problems with certificates, hosts, VMs or PernixData FVP. But then, I discovered two errors on the old vSphere C# client (I know that I should use the Web Client…)

HPE Data Protector stores multiple backup objects on a single Catalyst store item. A backup object can be a volume, a mount point, a database or a virtual machine. You can have multiple backup objects per backup client. If your filesystem backup job has four backup clients, and each client has two volumes, the backup job will contain 8 backup objects. Another example is a single database of a Microsoft SQL or Oracle database server (instance).

Today, I was at a customer to prepare a two node vSphere cluster for some MS SQL server tests. Nothing fancy, just two HP ProLiant BL460c Gen9 blades and two virtual volumes from a HP 3PAR. Each blade had two 400 GB SSDs, two 64 GB M.2 SSDs and a 1 GB MicroSD card. Usually, I install ESXi to a SD card. In this case, a MicroSD card. The SSDs were dedicated for PernixData FVP. Although I saw the MicroSD card in the boot menu, ESXi doesn’t showed it as a installation target.

Late last year, I applied a third time for the VMware vExpert program. This title is given from VMware to individuals who have significantly contributed to the community and have spread the message of VMware to customers and partners worldwide. This is nothing you get by passing an exam. It’s given to you by VMware in respect of your work. The vExpert title is something which differates you inside the commnity. Individuals who participate in the program, have access to betas, free licenses, early access briefings, free access to VMworld conference materials online, access to a private community, use of logos etc.

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. Craig highlighted Microsoft Network Load Balancing (NLB) as one of the possible ways to implement load balancing. Jason Langer also mentioned Microsoft NLB in his worth reading article “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of VMware View 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. You can use certreq.exe to create a CSR. This tool is mostly unknown, but it’s included since Server 2000. The syntax slightly differs between the version, so I focus on the version that is shipped with Server 2008/ Windows Vista and newer.