I’ve had several people ask me about using CD/DVD drives on VMware View virtual desktops.  Specifically,

• Can I use a CD or DVD drive with VMware View Desktops?
• Why doesn’t the CD or DVD drive on my re-purposed PC with the VMware View Client pass through to the View desktop?
• How can I make a CD or DVD drive work on my View Desktop?
• Are there specific CD/DVD drives that are supported on VMware View?
• How can I present a CD image (.ISO) to all View Desktops?

CD/DVD Devices in a View Environment – What works, what doesn’t?

First, the bad news.  When using PC over IP (PCoIP) as the connection protocol, IDE, SCSI, or SATA attached CD or DVD (or BluRay, HD-DVD, LaserDisc) drives local to the VMware View Client are not passed through to the VMware View virtual desktop.  This quite simply means that the internal CD drive of your re-purposed desktop will not be mapped to the View desktop when using PCoIP.  That said, mapping local CD or DVD drives to a View virtual desktop is supported when using Microsoft Remote Display Protocol (RDP).  Unfortunately, user experience (video performance, audio quality) declines and low/latent bandwidth  can increase if you switch from PCoIP to RDP.

The better approach to presenting a local CD/DVD drive to a View Desktop is to use a USB-connected drive.  This approach will work with both re-purposed PC’s acting as your View client as well as with Thin Clients and Zero Clients.  USB-connected devices can be passed through from a View Client to a VMware View virtual desktop while using PCoIP.  Teradici (the creators of PCoIP and maker of most of the Tera chips in industry leading Thin and Zero clients) has published a list of tested USB CD/DVD drives on their KB here http://techsupport.teradici.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=15164&task=knowledge&questionID=566.  Note that if you use some of these drives with a Windows XP View desktop, you may experience a View disconnect when ejecting a disc from the drive.  Other USB CD and DVD drives may also work – I grabbed this drive (OWC SuperSlim USB 2.0 Enclosure) from a colleague and was able to pass it through to my Clearpath Cloud hosted Windows 7 View desktop with no problems.

CD/DVD Drive Performance in a View Environment

While a USB connection will get your CD or DVD drive connected to your View desktop, performance may not be amazing.  For many tasks like software installs, reading images, or copying files performance will be acceptable.  A Teradici client can support up to 15Mbps for USB connected devices.  On a low bandwidth connection, or a connection with high latency, a local USB connected CD/DVD may not work well, if at all.  On a fast LAN connection, I would expect that redirected CD/DVD performance would be acceptable for many tasks, including reading medical images (PACS, DICOM viewer, RIS, HIS).  Do not expect to stream media or watch movies from a USB connected CD/DVD drive – but because View is typically a business solution, and watching the latest Hollywood hit at work is not often a business requirement, this should present few problems in all but the smallest niche cases (so get back to work!).  Disc burning would work with this configuration too – better for burning small images than a mass disc duplication effort.

Alternative Methods and Niche Cases

I’ve run into a few situations over the past decade or so of IT work where a desktop needed to have a CD/DVD perpetually connected to support some crummy application (FoxPro comes to mind here).  If you are supporting an environment like this, you can configure your parent VM with a persistently connected ISO on a VMFS or NFS vSphere datastore. Using this method, you could present the same CD image (.ISO) to all the VM’s based on the parent VM.  The connected ISO setting carries over to View Composer replicas and linked clones.  If you wanted to target this configuration to just a specific pool of View desktops, create a new snapshot of the parent image with the virtual CD/DVD drive set to ‘Connect at power on’ and an ISO file selected in the ‘Datastore ISO File’ field, as pictured below:

Note that in the VMware View Optimization Guide for Windows 7, and many other View tuning guides, it is recommended to remove the virtual CD/DVD drive from the parent VM.  If you follow this recommendation, you could still leverage a virtual CD/DVD drive, such as Microsoft Virtual CD Control Tool or UltraISO can also be used inside the View guest operating system, with an ISO library established on a low cost shared storage tier network share to give users a self-service way to mount a CD or DVD image.

Restricting Access to CD/DVD Devices in a VMware View Environment

While VMware-empowered IT is all about giving users freedom and control, there may be times where you want to restrict access to USB CD/DVD devices (or any other USB devices) in your VMware View environment.  You can do this in several ways – a complete solution will likely use a combination of the following methods based on user requirements, administrative overhead, and security posture:

• Use VMware View Group Policy administrative templates (.adm) applied to the View Client to control either ‘Connect all USB devices to the desktop on launch’ or ‘Connect USB devices to the desktop when they are plugged in’.
• If using RDP, use the same View Client (vdm_client.adm) administrative template to disable the ‘Redirect supported plug-and-play devices’
• Use built-in Active Directory Group Policy Objects (GPO), applied to your View Desktops OU’s, such as

• Administrative Templates | System | Removable Storage Access
• Administrative Templates | Windows Components | Remote Desktop Services | Device and Resource Redirection
• Administrative Templates | System | Device Installation | Device Installation Restrictions
• Use your Thin Client or Zero Client vendor’s management software to restrict access to, or disable, USB devices on Thin Clients.

Serial port devices in a VMware View environment

I’ve also had a couple questions about serial device (DB9 COM port) connections to View desktops.  Most of the above applies to serial devices too.  If serial devices are required in your environment, pick up a USB to Serial adapter (something like this will do Cables To Go 26886 USB To DB9 Male Serial Adapter, Blue (0.45 Meters/1.5 Feet)) and use GPO’s to control access and redirection of the USB device.

Wrap-up

Hopefully this answers your questions on using CD and DVD drives in a VMware View virtual desktop environment.  A combination of VMware View settings, vSphere VM configuration settings, and Microsoft Group Policy Objects (GPO’s) give you the ability to use and control removable media devices in your View environment.

Have you struggled with any other devices in your VMware View environment – leave a comment with your questions or suggested work-arounds!

Note: This article is cross-posted at the Clearpath Solutions Group blog at http://clearpathsg.com/weblog.

I upgraded my in-house VMware vSphere environment to 4.0 Update 2 last week.  After upgrading my vSphere Client to the Update 2 version I was greeted with a series of 7 ugly error messages stating: Method not found: ‘VMware.CustomControls.LabelEx VpxClient.Common.Util.Helper.AddLabel(System.Windows.Froms.Control,Int32, int32, System.String, System.Drawing.FontStyle, Boolean)”.I assumed a plug-in had caused the error message.  I started my troubleshooting by disabling the 3rd-party plug-ins in the environment, beginning with the free EMC Storage Viewer.  Upon disabling the EMC Storage Viewer 2.x plug-in the problem was resolved.  I went out to EMC PowerLink to see if an update was available for the plug-in and was surprised to find that I had missed a major update/rebranding of the plug-in.  EMC now calls the plug-in the ‘EMC Virtual Storage Integrator’.  A hotfix was released on July 2nd to bring Update 2 support to the plug-in (version 3.0.0.32).

I updated the Solution Enabler installation (I installed Solution Enabler on my vCenter server, but it is also available as a SUSE based virtual appliance), and then updated the plug-in.

The update appeared to install without any problems.  The vSphere Client launched like a champ after the update – no errors, but no EMC Storage plug-in either.  Odd.  The problem occurred on both my vCenter Server’s vSphere client and my workstation, so seems to be more than an isolated issue.

I did an uninstall of the plug-in using Add/Remove Programs, and then reinstalled it.  After the reinstall the EMC Storage plug-in icon appeared in my vSphere Client as pictured below.

The EMC Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) plug-in is free – installing it is a no-brainer for anyone running Clariion or Celerra storage arrays.  The VSI simplifies the job of mapping vSphere Datastores to LUN’s and NFS shares on your EMC storage, and helps pinpoint the location of VM’s and RDM’s on your array.  This visibility for the VMware administrator into the storage layer can go a long way in helping troubleshoot storage performance issues and simplifying communication between server, storage, and virtulization teams.

EMC actually offers three different free vSphere plug-ins, including the VSI.  The EMC Unified Block plug-in and the EMC Unified NAS plug-in round out the trio.  EMC’s Virtual Geek, Chad Sakac, covers all three in his blog post here: http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2010/06/update-on-emc-vsphere-plugins.html.

Here are some bookmarks for resources that I have recently referenced:

• vCenter 4 and ESX 4 Now Use 10 Year Default SSL Certificate | VM /ETC – Rich Brambly has some guidance on installing a new SSL certificate on vCenter, with very useful links in his post to official VMware documentation and KB’s on the subject.
• VMware vSphere Client on Microsoft Windows 7! | Virtual Lifestyle – Heiko Verlande has found a way to run the VMware vSphere Client on Windows 7.
• Virtu-Al » PowerCLI: Daily Report V2 – Version two of a handy PowerShell based VMware Environment Daily Report from VMware vExpert and PowerShell guru Alan Renouf
  What’s new/Bug Fixes
  * Active VMs count
  * Inactive VMs count
  * DRS Migrations count and list
  * Correct NTP Server check for each host
  * VMs stored on local datastores
  * NTP Service check for each host
  * vmkernel warning messages for each host
  * VM CPU ready over x%
• VMware Self-Service- VMware Update Manager Plug-In fails to install -Troubleshooting steps for vCenter Plug-in install problems.
• Using VMware VDI and vmSight for Stronger and Sustainable HIPAA and PCI Compliance – Virtualization brings new options for protecting sensitive data by moving it from the desktop into the datacenter.
• Counter of the Week : Analyzing Storage Performance – The purpose of this article is to provide prescriptive guidance on how to troubleshoot logical and physical disk response times in regards to Windows performance analysis. Start with the following performance counters to analyze disk response…
• NetApp, Compellent, HP, Dell top the field in 12-product test – Network World – A terabyte isn’t what it used to be. Disks are slower than you think. And a Gigabit Ethernet is plenty of bandwidth for many storage applications.

I started this blog for a couple reasons: 1.) To help you, my readers, with your virtualization projects, and 2.) To help myself by: a.) raising my online profile as an expert in the community, and b.) To give myself somewhere to keep tidbits of knowledge that I find myself going back to look for over and over again. This post is a 2b.

I just built up a new laptop and couldn’t remember how to set up pass-through authentication on my VI3 Client. A quick Google search gave me the answer, courtesy of Stu Radnidge‘s post on nothing other than VirtualCenter 2.5 Passthrough Authentication.  This little gem saves the terribly tedius work of having to manually enter your login credentials each time you launch the Virtual Infrastructure 3 Client by passing through your currently logged-in credentials to the VC server.  Thanks for the tip, Stu!