Double Take Cloud Migration Tool Gotchas

Double Take is the product from Vision Solution Group which helps organizations in near Zero downtime cloud and data centre server migrations, High availability, Disaster Recovery (DR) for IBM i, AIX, Windows and Linux server operating systems.

As part of my recent work on data center migration for one of the major banks in Melbourne,

Steps To Remove Horizon View Connection or Security Server from View

This article outline the steps to remove the Horizon View connection or security Server from the view MANAGER. 

Use case to remove Connection or security server from View Manager can be due to:

-          When you disable View connection or security  server in View Connection servers group, server entry might still exist within View configuration

-          Permanently decommissioning a View connection or security server in view connection server group or replacing view connection or security  server with the new instance of view connection or security server
 Before you try this article, see if this troubleshooting step helps you.

Steps to remove a View connection or security server from the server farm is as follows.

Server HBA Replacement Steps

This article outlines the steps required to replace Host Bus Adapter (HBA) cards on servers. In this example, the technologies involved are brocade fabric switch, Windows server/ VMware ESXi server and HP 3PAR storage but the same steps can be applied to other vendor technologies like Cisco MDS switch, EMC storage, Hyper-V host, IBM SAN etc…

Forward VMware Horizon View Events to Syslog Server

In addition to logging Horizon View events to event database, you can configure to send View events to Syslog servers ( Like Splunk, KiwiSyslog Server, WhatsUplog management etc…)  or to a local log file or to a UNC path somewhere in the network.  The limitation with the local file is the maximum size of the event log directory can’t go more than 300 MB if it grows more than 300 MB size, old logs will be deleted automatically. The default path for local syslog files is %PROGRAMDATA%\VMware\VDM\events\.

To configure Events on Horizon View, environment,

Five Document Review Checks to Keep Your Customers

If you are in the consulting world (Professional Services) or review technical design documents for internal teams, this Review Checklist template is for you.  These five checks help you not to lose your customers by sending document without proper checks/ review.

Image courtesy of 89studio at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Technical document peer review checklist can be used as part of the process to sign off the design document or proposal to send it to the customer.

Unable to setup the desktop session for display protocol

Issue: I was experiencing following error while connecting to Horizon View virtual desktop/ RDSH session through HTML 5 access

 Unable to set up the desktop session for display protocol, Please contact your system administrator.

VMware vCloud Suite 6 GA Is Available to Download

Exciting News!!!

VMware vCloud Suite 6 ( GA- General Availability) is out and ready to download with VMWare vCloud Suite 6. Start testing and plan upgrades accordingly. 

Before jumping onto the installation of new vSphere products, read this important information from VMWare before upgrading to vSphere 6.0

VMWare vCloud Suite 6 includes the following version 6 software.

Horizon View Connection Server Errors

I had a strange issue on the connection server. After long troubleshooting and trying to understand JMS and tomcat errors, I managed to fix the issue with the following instructions.

Symptoms:

Horizon View Windows optimization tools

While working on a VMware Horizon View solution for one of the customers, I come across two optimization tools

1 - RDSH_Optimizertool

2- VMware OSOptimization Tool

What can I do with EMC VSI on vSphere?

EMC VSI (Virtual Storage Integrator) is vCenter plug-in to perform EMC storage-related activities from vSphere client/ WebClient.

As per EMC, VSI is "No-charge VMware vCenter plug-in available to all VMware users with EMC storage in their environments. VSI enables IT organizations to achieve simplicity and efficiency in data center operations. VSI dramatically simplifies management of virtualized storage with the ability to map virtual machines to storage and to self-provision storage across EMC Symmetrix VMAX, EMC VNX and EMC XtremIO families of storage platforms from VMware vCenter"

Following activities can be performed using EMC VSI on VMware vSphere.

HP Custom Image for ESXi 5.5 Update 2 download

It’s really great to see HP is always ahead in releasing custom HP ESXi installation media. I know this as I always follow HP as soon as VMware releases a new ESXi version.

What is HP custom ESXi installation media?

VMware Health Analyzer 5 download, install and usage steps

This article is a step by step guide to download, install and usage of VMware Health Analyzer 5

If you are looking for the older version of VMware Health Analyzer, i.e. vSphere Analyzer 3, refer to “VMwareHealth Check Analyzer – ThinApp”

The previous version comes as ThinApp and OVF versions but the new one comes in JAVA and OVF versions.

This new version of VMware Health Analyzer 5.0.3.1 has capability to analyze the VMware Horizon View 5.1 and earlier environments.

VMware Health Check Analyzer - ThinApp

I really admire VMware for various reasons, some of them are innovation, stable products and excellent partner support.

When I say excellent partner support, I am referring to the content and tools they provide to partners to support their customers. One of the tools is VMware Health Check Analyzer. This is a really cool tool to review VMware vSphere environments in a short amount of time. 

( If you are looking for VMware vSphere and Horizon test plans, refer this article for detailed test scenarios)

Airwatch Supported Platforms

As you know, Airwatch is one of the leading Mobile Device Management (MDM) software and it’s acquired by VMware recently. VMware is actively working on integrating it with VMware Horizon Suite.

Recently one of my customers asked me what are all platforms he can manage with Airwatch? I sent him a list and thought of documenting the list here for the community.

Unable to find any array script (SRA) files. You must install SRAs before adding an array manager

Issue:

Recently I was working on implementing SRM for my customers using VMware vSphere 5.5, Site Recovery Manager 5.5 (SRM) and IBM StoreWize storage (V3700 and V7000)

After adding installing SRA, I was trying to add Array manager to SRM but presented with following error message.

Unable to find any array script (SRA) files. You must install SRAs before adding an array manager.

SRA Command 'discoverArrays' failed. Invalid Array ID

Issue: While adding V3700 or V7000 or any SVC controller Array Manager (SRA) to VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM), you get the following error message.

SRA Command 'discoverArrays' failed. Invalid Array ID

Refer to IBM SAN volume COntroller troubleshooting

Create Array Manager - SRA command 'discoverArr-ays' failed.View details... – in vCenter Task manager

VMware vSphere Multipathing policy best practices

Multipathing is the technique which helps ESXi hosts to have continuous connection to storage with the help of multiple storage paths.

This article talks about VMware ESXi multi-pathing best practices for various storage vendors (HP 3PAR StoreServ, MSA, IBM StorWize Family, EMC VNX etc...)

IBM StorWize Family -  Round Robin multi-pathing Policy

HP 3PAR StoreServ     -   Round Robin multi-pathing Policy
HP MSA 1040/2040 storage - Round Robin multi-pathing Policy

EMC VMAX and DMX Symmetrix Storage Array families - Round Robin multi-pathing Policy (Refer VMware article for more details) 

EMC VNX Family              -                              Round Robin multi-pathing Policy

Dell Compellent storage Family -             Round Robin multi-pathing Policy

NetApp FAS systems                      -              Round Robin multi-pathing Policy

In summary, Round Robin policy is the clear choice for all storage vendors.

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VMware Horizon 6- What is new in brief

VMware Horizon 6 is the latest and major version of VMware’s End-User Computing Solution (EUC) solution after Horizon View 5.3. 

(After implementing VMware Horizon view, verify the implementation with these test cases.)

What’s new in Horizon 6 in brief:

-          Application publishing - This is the major development

-          A unified workspace to deliver desktops and applications to end-user

-          VMware Virtual SAN(vSAN) support

-          Improved management and automation

-          Single image management support for physical and virtual desktops with mirage

-          Hybrid Cloud support including DAAS( Desktop As A Service)

DNS Round Robin config for Citrix Storefront or VMware View Connection/ Security servers

This article explains the steps to configure DNS Round Robin to load balance end-user connections among VMware Horizon View connection or  Security or Citrix Storefront servers. Even though DNS Round Robin is not a true load balancing solution, it works as a dumb load balancer if you are not ready to spend on expensive load balancers like F5, Citrix Netscaler etc…

An an alternative for DNS Round Robin is low-cost KEMP Load Balancers. I think the price for KEMP VLM 100 Load Balancer is a couple of thousand dollars and these are intelligent enough.

OK, let me start with the steps to configure DNS Round Robin.

ESXi host connectivity issue from vSphere client

The vSphere Client could not connect to x.x.xx. The server x.x.x.x took too long to respond. (The command has timed out as the remote server is taking too long to respond.)

I had above error while connecting Vmware ESXi 5 from vSphere client. I tried by restarting management agents with the following commands on ESXi hosts but didn’t resolve the issue. I assume restarting host also doesn’t resolve this problem.