Vmware

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”.

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.

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. The transport mode selection is set to “Automatic selection”.

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 5.5 Update 3b before updating ESXi to ESXi 5.5 Update 3b. vCenter Server will not be able to manage ESXi 5.5 Update 3b, if you update ESXi before updating vCenter Server to version 5.5 Update 3b. For more information about the sequence in which vSphere environments need to be updated, refer, KB 2057795.

Careful preparation is a key element to success. If you restart a storage controller, or even the whole storage, you should be very sure that all ESXi hosts have enough paths to every datstore. Sure, you can use the VMware vSphere C# client or the Web Client to check every host and every datastore. But if you have a large cluster with a dozen datastores and some Raw Device Mappings (RDMs), this can take a looooong time. Checking the path state of each LUN is a task, which can be perfectly automated. Get a list of all hosts, loop through every host and every LUN, output a list of all hosts with all LUNs and all paths for each LUN. Sounds easy, right?

Sometimes you need to reset the ILO Administrator password. Sure, you can reboot the server, press F8 and then reset the Administrator password. If you have installed a HP customized ESXi image, then there is a much better way to reset the password: HPONCFG.

Check the /opt/hp/tools directory. You will find a binary called hponcfg.

~ # ls -l /opt/hp/tools/
total 5432
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 5129574 Oct 28 2014 conrep
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 108802 Oct 28 2014 conrep.xml
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 59849 Jan 16 2015 hpbootcfg
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 251 Jan 16 2015 hpbootcfg_esxcli
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 232418 Jul 14 2014 hponcfg
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 12529 Oct 31 2013 hptestevent
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 250 Oct 31 2013 hptestevent_esxcli

All you need is a simple XML file. You can use the VI editor or you can copy the necessary file with WinSCP to the root home directory on your ESXi host. I prefer VI. Change the directory to /opt/hp/tools. Then open the pwreset.xml.

Another inconvenience that I noticed during the update process from VMware Horizon View 6.1.1 to 6.2 was, that the automatic screen resizing stopped working. When I connected to a desktop pool with the VMware Horizon client, I only got the screen resolution of the VM (the resolution that is used when connecting to the VM with the vSphere console)), not 1920x1200 as expected. This issue only occured with PCoIP, not with RDP. I had this issue with a static desktop and a dynamic desktop pool, and it occurred after updating the Horizon View agent. The resolution scaling worked with a Windows 2012 R2 RDS host, when I connected to a RDS with PCoIP.

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.