VMtoday

VMware News, Views, and How-To's from vExpert Josh Townsend

You are here: Home / Archives for Josh Townsend

Josh Townsend

VMware View 5.1 Announced

by Leave a Comment

VMware View Client IconOn May 2, 2012, VMware launched several new and updated products that comprise the End-User Computing Solutions. These products include Horizon Application Manager 1.5, VMware Project Octopus, VMware Zimbra 7.2, vCenter Operations for VMware View, and VMware View 5.1. All of these products together help IT take the next evolutionary step in the Post-PC era. Clearpath Solutions Group will be breaking down the full solution set for you, but today we want to focus on the first building block of the new End-User computing environment – VMware View 5.1. In VMware View 5.1, VMware introduced several new features that further reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) associated with deploying a virtual desktop infrastructure, promising increased performance with lower hardware costs, and simplified migration of desktops and user data into your company’s desktop computing cloud. A host of new storage-centric features introduced in VMware View 5.1 are the following:

    • VMware View Storage Accelerator – provides a ‘Content Based Read Cache’ for commonly read storage blocks. This will improve storage performance of Linked Clone desktops while reducing storage costs.
    • NFS Scaling – More vSphere ESXi hosts (up to 32) can be combined in a cluster connected to NFS storage to increase scalability of your virtual desktop cloud.
    • View Composer API for Array Integration (VCAI) – VCAI leverages native NFS capabilities to offload storage operations in a VMware View environment to the storage array.
    • Ability to place View Disposable Disks on datastores separate from View Linked Clone disks – this allows administrators to contain Linked Clone disk growth without consuming high-tier disk for disposable data.

Additional features introduced in this release improve both the View IT administrator and end-user experience. These enhancements include:

    • View Persona Management – Extended to physical desktops, simplifying the process of migrating user profile data from physical XP desktops to virtual Windows 7 desktops.
    • VMware vCenter Operations for VMware View – Automated deep insight into VMware View performance metrics with automated self-learning and alerting.
    • View Media Service – Ability to connect more types of peripherals to the View Desktop, adding multi-monitor support to View Local Mode.
    • New VMware View Clients – Updated versions of View clients will be made available for Mac, Windows, Linux, thin/zero clients, Apple iPad, Android, and Amazon Kindle Fire tablets. These new clients will further improve the user experience with optimized PCoIP support.
    • RADIUS Support – Enables more 2-factor authentication options.
    • View Administrator enhancements provide increased performance, simplified AD-object creation, and scalability for tens-of-thousands of View desktops.
    • View Composer component can be installed separate from vCenter, providing greater scalability and design choices for your View environment.

Stay tuned to the Clearpath Blog for more information on how these new features will help you realize improved IT operational efficiency while delivering optimized desktops services to users.

VMware Workstation 8.0.3 Released – Security Update

by 2 Comments

VMware released an update to VMware Workstation 8.0.3 Build 703057 yesterday (May 3, 2012).  The update is a security update addresses two vulnerabilities that would allow out-of-bounds memory writes on floppy and SCSI devices under certain conditions.  The vulnerabilities may allow specially crafted attacks to crash the VMX process (i.e. crash the running VM) or theoretically execute commands on the host.  The VMware Workstation 8.0.3 release notes can be found here: https://www.vmware.com/support/ws80/doc/releasenotes_workstation_803.html.

VMware’s security advisories for these vulnerabilities can be found here: https://www.vmware.com/security/advisories/VMSA-2012-0009.html.

Users of VMware Workstation should be prompted to update to the latest version when launching the application:

VMware Workstation 8.0.3 Update Prompt

If you are not automatically prompted to update VMware Workstation, manually check for updates from the Help menu:

manually check for updates in vmware workstation

You can also download the full install package of VMware Workstation from https://www.vmware.com/products/workstation.

While not specifically mentioned in the release notes, I wonder if this update was prompted by the VMware source code leak described in the VMware Security Blog: https://blogs.vmware.com/security/2012/05/vmware-security-note.html.  If so, kudos to VMware’s security and engineering teams for quickly identifying, fixing, and releasing updates to correct flaws that may be exposed through this code leak.

Using a CD/DVD drive in VMware View

by 2 Comments

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 https://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:

View Parent VM ISO Connected

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 https://clearpathsg.com/weblog.

VMware View + Clearpath Solutions Group = Love

Postponed! Potomac Regional VMUG is Coming to Washington D.C. – May 9th, 2012!

by Leave a Comment

This event has been postponed.  We have tentatively rescheduled for September 2012 (post VMworld).  Stay tuned to this site and https://dcvmug.com for more info and future events.

Potomac Regional VMUG is Coming to Washington D.C. – May 9th, 2012!

Join your fellow VMware users at this free, full-day event for in-depth technical sessions, demonstrations, exhibits, and networking opportunities. Come to the Nationals Stadium to meet with your peers and industry experts to discuss virtualization trends, best practices, and the latest technology!

Visit the Potomac Regional VMUG User Conference event page to reserve your place at this event now.

Take advantage of these educational and networking opportunities:

  • 8 VMware educational sessions
  • 12 partner education tracks
  • Exhibitor area with VMware partners
  • Complimentary breakfast and lunch
  • Registration is complimentary, so register today!
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
8:00 a.m. – 4:30 p.m.
Location
Nationals Park
1500 South Capitol Street Southeast
Washington, DC 20003

Register Now

Please note: You will need to log into the VMUG website to register for this meeting. If you have not already obtained your VMUG login credentials, please visit the Username and/or Password Help page to request your username and password.

Questions? Contact memberservices@vmug.com

VMware vSphere Resource Pools – Resource Allocation Revisited

by 14 Comments

I have found VMware vSphere Resource Pools to be an often misunderstood element, and incorrectly implemented by even seasoned VMware administrators.  I recently found an example of an incorrect implementation of Resource Pools being used to organize VM’s in vCenter’s Hosts and Clusters view, without considering the potential performance impact of this configuration.  I thought that I might try to explain the resource pool piece a bit better, particularly around Shares.

First, a few technical points to remember:

  • Resource Pools can only be used when VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) is enabled on a cluster.  DRS is available in vSphere Enterprise and Enterprise Plus editions.
  • VMware Shares are like stock/shares in a company –> Shares are proportional.  The more  shares you issue (on your company or in your VMware environment), the less valuable the individual share is.  The more shares you have, the greater your voting power/ability to claim a right to resources is.
  • The vSphere Hosts Cluster itself is technically a Resource Pool too.
  • Shares only come into play when there is resource contention (Memory or CPU).  If the host/cluster has spare resources available for a guest it allocates availability of those resources based on the configured vRAM size and vCPU count, taking into consideration any limits (Mem/CPU) on the VM.
  • Resource Pools can be used to apply resource Shares to VM’s, as well as Reservations and Limits.  Shares, Reservations, and Limits can also be set on a per-VM basis.  The values on Resource Pools and individual VM’s combined can do funny things.

Now, consider the following screen shot of the environment running on my laptop lab:

  vSphere Resource Pool Shares CPU Resource Allocation

I have 16 VM’s total, 4 in ResourcePool1, and 1 VM in ResourcePool2.  The resource pools are set to ‘Normal Shares’ with no other configuration changes to the default.  The VM’s are all the same size as far as vRAM and vCPU are concerned.

If we look at the ‘Resource Allocation’ tab of the Cluster, we see that the VM’s in the Cluster resource pool each have 5% of the Shares for CPU, and each ‘Normal’ resource pool has 21% of the total shares of the cluster.  If we divide the 21% shares by the 4 VM’s in ResourcePool1, we find that each VM gets 5.25% of the cluster’s total shares.  That means that the VM’s in this ‘Normal’ pool actually get a bit more CPU time under resource contention than those in the parent cluster pool.  The single VM (MoveVM1) in ResourcePool2 gets 21% of the shares all to itself – much larger than the remaining VM’s in the Cluster, even though it may not be a VM of higher importance in your environment.

Now consider Memory resource allocation:

 vSphere Resource Pool Shares Memory Resource Allocation

The ‘Normal’ shares value for memory on a resource pool is 163840.  Compare this to the 640 shares each single VM gets in my current config (VM-* each have 64MB RAM, so a very low share value per VM).  We’ve effectively configured only a fraction of 1% (basically 0% shares) to the VM’s in the parent cluster pool, while the few VM’s in the ResourcePool1 and ResourcePool2 get to share 48% of cluster resources per pool.  This still leads to an imbalance for the VM’s in each pool as compared to VM’s in the sibling pool and to the VM’s in the parent pool.  I.E. – MoveVM1 gets all 48%; while the four VM’s in ResourcePool1 share 48% (48/4=12% each).

Now let’s say that ‘MoveVM1’ was just a VM that a well-intentioned administrator spun up for some testing, putting it in a resource pool for ease of locating it in an otherwise busy vCenter view.  This otherwise inconsequential testing VM now has the right to claim 48% of the memory (vRAM) in the cluster and 21% of CPU time when there is resource contention in the cluster.  Now if this lowly testing VM is the cause of resource contention on an otherwise healthy cluster, it’s getting its cake and eating it too.  When the going get’s tough, the least valuable workload gets the priority in this configuration!  We’ve created a case where the meek (VM) shall inherit the resources.  All your resources are belong to us.  You get the idea – a big fat oops!

Hopefully you can see how using Resource Pools as units of organization can negatively affect the performance of an environment under resource contention, even if those resource pools are configured with ‘default/normal’ values.  The risk becomes more severe if the values of those resource pools were to change (say, move to a ‘High’ value for shares on ResourcePool2 in my lab).

Best Practices

  • It is best to use folders the ‘VM’s and Templates View’ in the vSphere Client for organizing VM’s and only (sparingly) use resource pools to achieve specific performance goals under resource contention (shares) and/or resource allocation goals (limits & reservations) under normal operating circumstances with resource availability.
  • Use the Resource Allocation tab to review and tune your Resource Pool (and individual VM) Shares settings.  Export the resource allocation list from vCenter and use Excel if you want to experiment with values and do what-if calculations.
  • Restrict permissions to create and modify resource allocation on VM’s and on Resource Pools in vCenter to only VMware Administrators who understand the implications of these changes, and who are capable of doing the math to properly design a resource allocation model.  If you don’t have an expert on staff, engage a consultant to help (might I suggest Clearpath Solutions Group ;-)).
  • Check out VMware vCenter Operations Manager (vCenter Ops/ vCOPs) for advanced monitoring and capacity planning (the product formerly known as VMware CapIQ is included with vCenter Ops).  Good monitoring and forecasting can help to avoid resource contention in highly consolidated, oversubscribed, or performance-sensitive environments (and what environments are not all three of these today?).
  • Review the VMware vSphere Resource Management Guide to better understand the use and function of Resource Pools. The Guide can be found here: https://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/topic/com.vmware.ICbase/PDF/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-50-resource-management-guide.pdf.
  • Buy  Duncan Epping’s and Frank Denneman’s book, VMware vSphere 5 Clustering Technical Deepdive to really understand how VMware vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) (as well as VMware High Availability (HA) VMware Distributed Power Management (DPM), and VMware Storage DRS) function and are best configured.