free

PSA: Less Than 1 Month Until Free VMware vCloud Suite Offer Expires

November 16, 2012 by Josh Townsend 1 Comment

A friendly public service announcement: VMware announced at VMworld 2012 in San Francisco that any customer with vSphere Enterprise Plus licensing under a current Support & Subscription (SnS) agreement as of August 27th would receive a free upgrade to the new vCloud Suite Standard Edition. The free upgrade offer is only available through December 15, 2012. The vCloud Suite Standard Edition includes vSphere Enterprise Plus, VMware vCloud Director, vCloud Connector and vCloud Networking & Security Standard (formerly known as vShield Edge and vShield App). There’s some other great discounts to move from the vCloud Suite Standard edition to higher editions with even more functionality built in — I’ve detailed those here: https://blog.clearpathsg.com/blog/bid/222512/VMware-vCloud-Suite-Upgrade-Notes. VMware added products to the vCloud Suite at VMworld 2012 in Europe making the Enterprise Edition very attractive for customers building private clouds and moving towards hybrid clouds – more on that here: https://blog.clearpathsg.com/blog/bid/232283/VMworld-Europe-News-and-Announcements. Another cool thing to consider is that when you license the vCloud Suite, the components within (vCenter Operations, vCloud Director, Site Recovery Manager, etc.) switch from a per-VM license model to an ESXi host socket license model meaning that you’ll be able to use these products cheaper and without a licensing headache for each new workload you stand up.

Here’s the important bit – the upgrade is not automatic (and not really free). To claim the upgrade you need to go through a license purchase process, paying a whopping $1 per socket that you want to upgrade. Because of this, you should not wait until the final hour to claim the upgrade – get it done early; financial transactions can take some time to clear. If you need help getting the upgrade process completed, feel free to reach out to us at Clearpath – we try to make VMware Support Renewals and Upgrade licensing as simple as possible. Contact us here if you need help: https://info.clearpathsg.com/vmware-support-renewals/.

I’ve done some licensing exercises for customers and we’ve found that if you have or were planning to purchase a couple components of the Suite a la carte, it may be cheaper to do it through the vCloud Suite with the added bonus of all of the other included products coming for ‘free’.

Free VMware View Load Balancer Using SUSE Studio and HAProxy

September 27, 2012 by Josh Townsend 4 Comments

I’ve had several customers ask me what options they have for providing redundancy / high availability / load balancing for their VMware View Connection Servers and Security Servers. VMware View does not provide its own load balancing functionality. Many are smaller customers without any existing load balancers in place, or want something they can use during a View pilot or Proof of Concept engagement. Administrators who find themselves in a similar situation have a few choices for providing high availability for View servers:

Buy a load balancer – F5, A10, Cisco ACE. Expensive, complex for small environments.
Use DNS Round Robin – DNS RR is easily configured, but has no awareness of the workloads behind it. If a View Security Server or Connection Server fails, DNS Round Robin will continue to send clients to that failed server until the failed server is restored or removed from DNS (and the DNS TTL expires from client caches).
Use poor man’s DNS failover – have only one connection server responding to the DNS record for your View environment. Have a 2nd View replica server running but not registered in DNS. If the active host fails, switch your DNS to point to the replica (you don’t want to be changing IP’s of View servers). This is a manual failover that would require some additional monitoring. It is not very fast to fail over as the DNS TTL would have to expire for the change to be recognized by clients.
Microsoft Network Load Balancing (NLB) – This can be a pain to configure if your View Connection Servers and Security Servers are running on vSphere – see here for more: https://kb.vmware.com/kb/1006778. Jon Owings has a post on how to configure View for NLB here: https://www.2vcps.com/2010/04/26/using-network-load-balancing-with-view/
Use VMware vShield Edge / vCloud Networking and Security if you are lucky enough to be licensed for these products.
Roll your own! I created a virtual appliance based on SLES 11 SP2 using SUSE Studio. My virtual appliance has HAProxy installed (as well as VMware tools, SUSEFirewall2, and a few other packages).

VMware offers support/subscription for SLES if you have an active Support and Subscription (SnS) agreement. See here for more info: https://www.vmware.com/products/sles-for-vmware/overview.html

I have provided a sample configuration for HAProxy that will balance HTTP/HTTPS connections to your View Security Servers and View Connection Servers. The appliance is very light weight – 512MB RAM, 5GB HDD, 1 vCPU.

I am using Source based balancing to provide session stickyness. A client IP hash is used to assign the client to a host. The client continues to use the designated host until the host is placed in maintenance mode or fails a health check. This will help to keep PCoIP Secure Gateway and RDP Secure Tunnel sessions routed to the same Security/Connection server that brokered the session.

To add your View servers, edit the haproxy.cfg found in /etc/haproxy using vi, then restart haproxy for changes to take effect (/etc/init.d/haproxy restart).

You’ll probably want different View Load Balancers for your Security Servers and Connection servers as pictured below. It is possible to multi-home these and bind different IP’s to different ethernet interfaces, but because the appliances are so small you might as well just make a few different ones.

I have configured HAProxy to authenticate user logins to the stats page. This allows the administrator to place load balanced Security or Connection Servers into maintenance mode with a simple web dashboard:

To get started with my VMware View load balancer appliance do the following:

Download it from SUSE Studio here: https://susestudio.com/a/R42GDM/vmtoday-vmware-view-load-balancer
Import OVA to vSphere.
Configure vSphere networking – assign to port group.
Power on appliance.
Accept SUSE license: Press ‘q’ on license screen, then ‘y’ to accept
Accept EULA. Promise not to sue me if this doesn’t work, has security flaws, or totally destroys your virtual datacenter.
Modify network configuration as appropriate (see Change option to assign a static IP) or next to accept the default DHCP.
Log in as root with the default password.
Edit the haproxy config file at /etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg > vi /etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg. Uncomment the server lines for View HTTP and View HTTPS and add alias names and IP’s for your Connection Servers or Security Servers.
Restart HAProxy > /etc/init.d/haproxy restart. If no errors are reported, HAProxy should now be running.
Change your DNS for desktop.example.com (or whatever your View DNS name is) to point to the IP of the load balancer.
Update your View environment’s External URL for HTTP(S) Secure Tunnel and PCoIP Secure Gateway for the IP of the load balancer.
Test with HTTP/HTTPS connections to be sure the View Portal opens.
Test with View Client.

To access the stats page, go to https://applianceIP:1936/haproxy?stats/. Log in with the haproxy account.

Credentials for the haproxy and root accounts are included in the SUSEStudio page for the appliance. I recommend you change these and update the haproxy.cfg to reflect your password changes.

For a LB deployed in the DMZ for Security Servers, you’ll need to open ports 80, 443, 4172 (UDP/TCP) from the internet to the load balancer (see this for more info: https://pubs.vmware.com/view-51/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.vmware.view.planning.doc%2FGUID-57D362EB-AC04-45B8-87AA-05A15A998211.html).

With a single virtual appliance, we have introduced a new single point of failure while trying to solve the single points of failure at our View Connection and Security servers. It is possible to combine multiple copies of my View Load Balancer appliances together in a highly available cluster using keepalived (for cluster heartbeating) and Mercurial (for haproxy.cfg synchronization). Nathan Evans has a great post on doing this here: https://nbevans.wordpress.com/2011/02/27/deploying-ha-proxy-keepalived-with-mercurial-for-distributed-config/. Andy Leonard also has some tips for getting HAProxy and keepalived working here: https://andyleonard.com/2011/02/01/haproxy-and-keepalived-example-configuration/.

The next version if haproxy (1.5) will include native SSL support, with SNI and multi-process session sharing. This will allow SSL offloading for your View Connection Servers and Security Servers, instead of just passing through as I have it in the haproxy 1.4 on this appliance. Once 1.5 reaches a stable release I’ll rebuilt the appliance with 1.5 to support SSL offload.

F5 offers a good whitepaper on configuring their load balancers (Big-IP) for View 5.0 here: https://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/partners/f5networks/f5-vmware-view-deployment-guide-v17.pdf. It may come in helpful if you want to make any additional modifications to the HAProxy config.

If you don’t want to go with my setup, no offense taken. There are alternatives: pfSense https://www.viktorious.nl/2012/05/02/can-pfsense-be-used-as-a-free-load-balancer-for-vmware-view/ should work, as would Citrix NetScaler – https://virtualfuture.info/2012/02/free-load-balancing-for-vmware-view-with-citrix-netscaler-vpx-express/ (but it feels a bit dirty to use a Citrix solution for VMware View ;-))

You can use this haproxy appliance to load balance other traffic, such as Microsoft Remote Desktop / Terminal Services /RDP. You could also apply it to an Exchange array to load balance Exchange 2010 CAS arrays as described here: https://www.stevieg.org/e2010haproxy/.

Let me know if you have any ideas or improvement in the comments section below!

The Dark Knight A Rises a Day Early

July 11, 2012 by Josh Townsend Leave a Comment

Here’s an event for those of you in the Washington, DC area.

Join Clearpath, VMware and Veeam for a special private viewing of the The Dark Night Rises on July 19th. The day will start out with breakfast and a brief and informative presentation on backing up virtualized environments. Following the presentation and a short break for audience questions, we’ll be viewing The Dark Knight Rises* a day before the general public. Don’t miss this unique opportunity to further your virtualization learning while getting to see the Dark Knight before any of your friends or family. Sign up today!

During the presentation, you’ll learn how to create a solid backup policy by consolidating more workloads and reducing your hardware footprint. Preservation of critical business data is essential to all organizations. Come learn about best practices and options for ensuring business continuity and safeguarding your environment.

Join us for this entertaining and informative event! Register today.

Event Details:
Date: Thursday, June 19^th
Time: 8:30 am – 1 pm
Location: Ballston Common Stadium 12
671 N. Glebe Road, Arlington, VA

*Please note that this film has been rated PG-13. Parents are strongly cautioned that some material may be inappropriate for children under 13.

AGENDA:

8:30 AM – Attendee Check-in & Breakfast
9:00 AM – 9:45 AM – Presentation: Backing Up Virtualized Environments by Clearpath’s vExpert Jason Shiplett
9:45 AM – 10:00 AM Break
10:00 AM – 12:45 PM – The Dark Knight Rises

VMware Themed Desktop Background Wallpapers

June 22, 2012 by Josh Townsend 2 Comments

5/12/2014 – Sorry, I’ve been asked to remove these images.

Update: 7/10/2012 – There are now more than 60 VMware desktop background images in the collection. Not all are in the ThemePack yet – I’ll refresh that later if people want it. I’ve also added a rating system to the images so you can tell me which ones you like, and which are so horrid you wouldn’t wish it on your worst helpdesk-abusing user.

I spent a few minutes clearing my head between projects today by throwing together a collection of 40 41 (thanks @lamw for the multi-colored triangles on white image) VMware themed desktop background wallpapers. Some I borrowed from other sources, some I made myself. Check out my page with all of the images, as well as a quick Windows ThemePack I put together to easily grab all of the images for your desktop.

The very busy images (I’m looking at you crazy green, blue, purple, yellow triangle cluster monstrosity) are not good candidates for VMware View desktops as the many shapes and shades are not optimal for the View client side cache, but the simple black or grey may background ones (below) may be just the ticket if you want to dress up your View environment a bit.

I use the VMware Workstation image below for my VM’s running on my laptop to help figure out which machine I’m working on – helps when you get several levels deep in nested virtualization.

I’ve also got some with the Clearpath logo if you want to show us some love 8-).

Feel free to send me more to add to the gallery – leave a comment below if you’ve got good ones!

VMworld T-Shirt Count

August 29, 2010 by Josh Townsend 2 Comments

Way back in the day (we’re talking way back in high school here) I worked my summers away at a Six Flags park in Western New York. Every fall the park hosted an International Food Festival. Let me tell you – the perogies, sausage and gyro’s slid down like nobody’s business. But the real prize was the Italian bakery’s cannoli’s. The 5 or so folks that shared an office with me decided we should track our cannoli consumption. We did (like you do a drug or spin up VM’s just cause you can) something like 126 cannoli’s in one weekend. We called it the Cannoli Count – kept a tally o a whiteboard in the office. Sickening, right? So, what does this have to do with virtualization, you ask. Well, not much really, but here is where I am going with it. T-shirts are handed out like nobody’s business at VMworld, and they accumulate like a pack-rat’s pile of newspapers in my dresser drawers (I still have a high-school wrestling t-shirt that dates back to 1994 in the rotation). My VMware Widow wife hates them, so I figure I’ll see how many more I can collect this week. With two already in my hands after VMworld check-in, enter the:

Josh’s VMworld 2010 T-Shirt Count
||

I’ll keep the running tally going throughout VMworld – let’s see where this ends up (besides me cleaning out my dresser to avoid sleeping on the couch when I get home).