Horizonview

As part of a project, I had to deploy a VMware EUC Access Point appliance. Nothing fancy, because the awesome VMware Access Point Deployment Utility makes it easy to deploy.

Unfortunately, the deployed Access Point appliance was not working as expected. When I tried to access my Horizon View infrastructure behind the Access Point appliance, I got a HTTP 504 error. The REST API interface was working. I was able to exclude invalid certificates, routing, or firewall policies. I re-deployed the appliance using the the IP address of the connection server, instead of the FQDN. And this worked… I checked the name resolution with nslookup and the name resolution failed. So that was probably the problem.

Nearly a month ago, a tweet caught my attention:

New Blog Post: Discounted VCP7-DTM Beta Exam for a Limited Time https://t.co/IkwLTDdvO5

— VMware Learning (@VMwareEducation) October 4, 2016

These beta exams are a cost-effective way to achieve certifications. The last beta exam I took, was the VCP6-DCV beta. Because I already had the VCP6-DTM on my to-do list, the new VCP7-DTM beta exam was released just in the right moment.

As already mentioned in the blog post of the VMware Education and Certification Blog, there are primarly three reasons to take this beta exam:

Nearly two weeks ago, I wrote a blog post (VMware Horizon View space reclamation fails) about failing space reclamation on automated desktop pools with linked clones. Today I write about the same error, but caused by another problem. In both cases, the error is logged in the View Administrator and the vSphere (Web) Client. On the View Administrator, the following error is shown:

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

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.

I’m running a small VMware Horizon View environment in my lab. Nothing fancy, but all you need to show what Horizon View can do for you. This environment includes a Windows Server 2012 R2 RDS host. During the update process from Horizon View 6.1.1 to 6.2, I had to update the View agent on this RDS host. This update installation failed with an “Internal Error 25030”, followed by a rollback. Fortunately I had a snapshot, so I went back to the previous state and tried the update again. This attempt also went awry.