Certainly 2020 has been an interesting year we won’t forget soon, this year has caused me to do some reflection and I realized one of the things i miss doing is blogging and documenting random things that come up in my day to day job, training and tid bits I learn along the way, failures and successes. I personally find value for me in that it helps me retain the knowledge and others have shared with me in the past they found things that were valuable to them.
So what does that mean, I am going to start blogging again pretty actively. I am going to reload my lab and start from scratch and document it both in my on-prem lab and the cloud (Azure, AWS, and GCP) for various things listed further below.
My blog will probably focus on a mix of the following that come up in my day to day job in End User Computing (EUC) space, some will be detailed, some will be micro-blogs for a particular thing. Below is a list of topics that may come up but not all inclusive.
Citrix EUC solutions
VMware EUC solutions, may do some datacenter here and there too
Microsoft – WVD, Azure, M365/O365, AD, Cloud Services, SSO, MFA, FSLogix and more
Nutanix – Files, Frame
Liquidware
F5
NVIDIA GRID
AWS
Of particular focus for me will be certification walkthroughs based on the exam guides, i have several on the list this year.
First blogs up will be around my lab and the following certs
A day late, but yesterday I received some exciting news. NVIDIA announced the founding class of their new program, NVIDIA Community Advisors (or NCA for short).
What is the NCA Program you ask? I am glad you asked…
The program brings together the talents of individuals who have invested significant time and resources to become experts in NVIDIA products and solutions. Together, they give the entire NVIDIA GRID ecosystem access to product management, architects and support managers to help ensure we build the right products.
I am very excited about this program as I think the GPU is a critical component of a virtual workspace, be it published applications or virtual desktops. I believe these are becoming a crucial part and one day even a full requirement for enhancing and ensuring a solid end user experience and customer success. NVIDIA Grid has been a key part of my success with several recent projects for my customers. I am super proud and humbled to be including in the founding twenty members.
Please read the official release on the NVIDIA blog (follow it as well for GRID information)
Those selected for the program will be key technologists in the broader GRID customer and partner community. They’ll have the opportunity to work closely with and influence key engineering and business teams.
Other program benefits include:
In-person meetings and private webinars with NVIDIA product teams for detailed discussions on current technologies and product roadmaps
Special incentives to attend or speak at NVIDIA GTC and other events
Access to a private forum for discussions with NVIDIA product teams about technologies, product updates, and priority technical support
Monthly member conference calls with key product and development staff
Access to demo licenses of current products and to early releases of future products
Technical support contacts
A big thank you to NVIDIA and everyone that worked hard to make this program happen. I am a big proponent of community and these community based programs as they can be important to the feedback and development of the solution to meet customer’s needs in the future. I am also a member of the following community programs for Citrix (CTA), VMware (vExpert) and Cisco (Cisco Datacenter Champion) and I have seen these programs do great things for the greater community.
Last but not least Applications for the 2017 NVIDIA GRID Community Advisor program will open in January so watch the NVIDIA blog and watch the NCAs and twitter for more announcements around that time.
Just one more thing…
And a special thank you to Thomas Poppelgaard, you may not be in the first round of NVIDA NCA’s but i wouldn’t have half the knowledge of NVIDIA GRID and vGPU without your substantial work and contributions to the community. Thank you sir. Follow his blog, follow him on twitter. I cannot thank you enough for the work that you do for this community. My hat’s off to you sir.
A common issue on higher resolution desktops when running a virtual machine is that the display inside the virtual machine icons/text appears way too small. For example when running a Windows 10 VM in Fusion on my Retina MacBook Pro.
This is what i see, no matter what I change the resolution too, it doesn’t look right. Changing icon size also doesn’t solve the issue. So how did I solve this issue
It has been over a year since I became an independent consultant (more on that is coming soon). It has also been more than a year since I have blogged content on a regular basis. It is time for me to get back in the saddle.
I have a lot of half written blog posts that i have started and stopped. It is time to get back on the horse and finish some of this work. I find the blogging process quite enjoyable and when I am blogging it keeps me engaged and learning which is one of my personal drivers in life. ABL – Always be learning. It is time to get that back.
I also just moved my blog to a new hosting site and platform so I am working to resolve most of these issues with the website migration such as some pictures not importing and 404 issues with a few articles.
Some highlights and articles coming:
Citrix
NetScaler
XenApp/XenDesktop
VMware
Horizon
NSX
AppVolumes
UEM
Conferences
Citrix Synergy Vegas
E2EVC Vegas
VMworld (???) TBD
What are you working on? Let me know in the comments.
VMware released a fling that should help people check their servers to ensure they are ready to install vCenter 5.1. the vCenter 5.1 Pre-Install Script
Run this script on the server that you will install Single Sign On, this can be the same server as vCenter or independent. Run the script as the user you plan on doing the installation as.
The script will:
Check the Server for requirements
Check the Server for some known issues
Check Active Directory permissions and settings
Check vCenter for some known issues
Read Only: Makes no changes
Requirements.
Windows 2003/ Windows 2008/2008 R2 on 64bit in a domain environment.
.Net Framework 3.5.0 or above
PowerShell 2.0 or above
PowerShell must be able to run scripts (Execution Policy must be assigned correctly)
PowerCLI 5.1 is required for an upgrade scenario.
PowerShell must be launched as Administrator
Run in 64 Bit PowerShell (Do not run in PowerShell (x86))
This will be a great start to ensure you don’t have issues with SSO before you begin the vCenter installation.
I usually recommend that customers wait when new products are released so that other early adopters such as your Partners and the community at large can find the bugs for the Vendor to fix. This recommendation is pretty much universal whether it be Microsoft, Citrix, VMware or any vendor.
Citrix announced a forthcoming patch next month for XenServer 6.1 and XenTools that should resolve issues that many customers may be experiencing. I have seen some of these errors in my testing and wanted to let you know that a fix was coming.
Cisco released a vSpherevCenter plugin for Cisco UCS
Cisco UCS vCenter Plug-in is an extension for the vSphere Web Client v5.1 or higher. It enables virtualization administrators to view, manage and monitor various aspects of Cisco UCS physical infrastructure. The result is a single pane of glass for Virtual Center users to get both physical and virtual infrastructure information for a given hypervisor. The zip file contains
The actual plugin zip file (ucs-vcplugin-0.9.1.zip)
VMware Labs presents its latest FlingvFabric Data Director Service Gateway for Cloud Foundry . vFabric Data Director Service Gateway for Cloud Foundry enables service providers to deliver a vFabric Postgres database-as-a-service solution based on CloudFoundry.org and vFabric Data Director. This software product provides an interface between Cloud Foundry and vFabric Data Director. The interface enables Cloud Foundry users to access enterprise features provided by Data Director (e.g., create and delete vFabric Postgres databases).
Features
Integrates VMware’s PaaS and DBaaS solutions
Allows service providers to offer enterprise-class database functionality including:
Snapshots and database clones for rapid deployment of test/dev environments
Database-consistent hot snapshots that provide instant backups
Hot external backups for durability
Point-in-time recovery with both snapshots and external backups
Proactive monitoring, alerts, and notifications
Comprehensive view of resource usage
Open source allows customization and extension of core service gateway functionality
VMware has announced another fling, vBenchmark. vBenchmarks helps measure the benefits of your virtualized VMware environment. VMware flings are cool free tools and pet projects of VMware engineers. Some of these get incorporated into the larger products while others do not. It is a great way to see what is being worked on and what may be coming. vBenchmark Summary Have you ever wondered how to quantify the benefits of virtualization to your management? If so, please consider using vBenchmark. vBenchmark measures the performance of a VMware virtualized infrastructure across three categories:
Efficiency: for example, how much physical RAM are you saving by using virtualization?
Operational Agility: for example, how much time do you take on average to provision a VM?
Quality of Service: for example, how much downtime do you avoid by using availability features?
vBenchmark provides a succinct set of metrics in these categories for your VMware virtualized private cloud. Additionally, if you choose to contribute your metrics to the community repository, vBenchmark also allows you to compare your metrics against those of comparable companies in your peer group. The data you submit is anonymized and encrypted for secure transmission.
Key Features:
Retrieves metrics across one or multiple vCenter servers
Allows inclusion or exclusion of hosts at the cluster level
Allows you to save queries and compare over time to measure changes as your environment evolves
Allows you to define your peer group by geographic region, industry and company size, to see how you stack up
vBenchmark is packaged as a virtual appliance with the following configuration:
vCPUs: 1
vRAM: 1.5 GB
vHDD: 5 GB
Compatible Browsers:
Firefox 9+ (Windows)
Firefox 5+ (Linux)
Chrome 12+ (Windows & Linux)
Safari 5+ (Mac)
Internet Explorer 9+ (Windows)
vBenchmark Instructions
There are 3 deployment options for vBenchmark:
OVF: can be deployed directly to vCenter server 4.x, 5.0 and vCloud Director 1.x
OVA: can be deployed on vCenter server 4.x and 5.0
VMX: can be opened in VMware Workstation, VMware Fusion and VMware Player.
Once the virtual appliance has been deployed and powered on, you can access the vBenchmark application from a web browser by entering the IP address of the virtual appliance.
