VMwareInfo.Com

rant: Office 365 Spam “Protection”.

2013-05-17T11:05:00.000-04:00

17960 legitimate messages and only 70 flagged for SPAM? I don’t think so Microsoft. You can’t, with a straight face, call that mail protection. You just can’t. It’s laughable. At this point I would rather see those numbers flip flopped. At least my systems wouldn’t be at risk by the crowds of viruses casually walking past the Forefront protection.
For my part, I wake up to about 25 – 30 spam messages that I end up deleting from my iPhone as I commute in to work. Some of the messages that get through are not only clearly SPAM but also especially dangerous for the average user. Phishing schemes, Trojans and other internet nastiness co-mingling in the inbox just waiting for a careless click.
That’s it. Back to deleting SPAM.

Citrix ShareFile Outlook add-in.

2013-05-15T11:57:00.000-04:00

I’ve been messing around with Citrix ShareFile a bit and it’s not bad depending on what you are hoping to use it for.

If you haven’t heard of it, Citrix ShareFile allows you to securely share, store and access documents within it from any of our ever increasing and diversified devices. Basically an enterprise replacement for everyone’s personal DropBox accounts in your organization. I won’t get into which is better but they will definitely be pitted against each other in the file sharing/syncing space.

One of the features I really like is the Outlook integration add-in. Among other things, you can have the add-in grab any attachment over a certain size, upload them to ShareFile and swap it out for a link to the upload. Very effective for large files being sent through email. Especially useful when sending outside your organization when size limits might be in place. Recipients of multiple attachments within a message get the option to zip them before downloading.

After sending the attachment link, senders can also optionally get notifications if anyone actually downloads the attachment and expire it if necessary. It’s pretty slick.

If you have ShareFile already, check out this link for the Outlook download.

Uneven XenDesktop DDC load – Check your VDA policies.

2013-05-13T11:14:00.001-04:00

So you’ve create a bunch of DDCs so that your connections will be appropriately load balanced but when you check on them in the Desktop Studio, you see a grossly underbalanced farm! What’s up?

Be sure to check on the VDA policies and that any DDC registration registry entries are correct and appropriate for the desktop OS.

Registration location on Desktop OS: HKLM\Software\Policies\Citrix\VirtualDesktopAgent\ListOfDDCs

HKLM\Software\Citrix or HKLM\Software\Wow6432Node\Citrix depending on whether the desktop is 32 or 64 bit. There should also be a space between each of the DDCs listed in the key’s value.
You can verify successful (or failed) registrations in the Client’s Event Viewer.

Even though a single XenDesktop DDC could potentially support your required load without breaking a sweat, an uneven distribution of desktops across brokers can be a symptom of a configuration error that could be breaking your high availability design.

EMC’s HAVT utility tip

2013-04-25T15:10:00.001-04:00

If you’ve launched the High Availability Verification Tool before from Unisphere, you might have seen a similar “does not support high availability” message. If everything checked out fine and you are now searching frantically on the interwebs for an answer, don’t worry, you are probably just running an iSCSI configuration with your vSphere environment.

This server [ESX HOST] has only one HBA (host bus adapter) and does not support high availability.

You can safely ignore this error. The issue involves the way the HAVT tests for high availability on a host. The tool is a hold over from a Fiber Channel only world where 2 HBAs were the minimum requirement for high availability status. With iSCSI, even when you have two NIC cards in your ESX hosts, the IQN name is the same for both NICs and the array thinks you have only one adapter and therefore unable to support high availability.

You DO want to check to verify that you are seeing multiple PATHs to the array though from the ESX hosts. For that, look at the properties of the iSCSI software adapter in Storage Adapters on each ESX hosts' configuration tab to validate that you are able to see the appropriate redundant paths per ESX server [usually 8].

BTW: I really had no reason to include the racks of EMC VNXs at the top of this blog post but come on … Check out those blue lights! How could I not?

Tweaking your Windows 7/XP Desktops on VDI

2013-04-24T15:49:00.001-04:00

My buddy John Simon has put together some common tweaks he uses for for his company’s Virtual Desktops. These are easy tweaks that can be used in VMware View and Citrix XenDesktop desktops but are sometimes forgot. Pop them into your VM template and reap the performance benefits. Some can also be used on your local machine for some enhanced performance.

Disable hibernation by running the command powercfg /hibernate off from the command line (WIN7/XP):

Set the windows page file to a static number. By default windows will grow and shrink the page file which will cause an I/O overhead. This value should be 1.5 x the amount of system RAM with a limit of 4096 for a 32bit operating system (WIN7/XP):

Disable indexing by going to properties of the C drive and un-checking the box to allow indexing service to index this disk for fast file searching (WIN7/XP):

Disable the boot graphic, this graphic is not needed for a virtual machine and just consumes resources. To do this click on start and then run and run msconfig. From the pop up window, click on the boot tab and then check the box for NO GUI BOOT (WIN7/XP):

Uninstall Tablet PC Components by going to control panel – programs and features and select turn windows features on or off then remove the checkbox by Tablet PC components (WIN7):

Finally you should disable logging on the VM from the VM settings menu. This can be done by going to the options tab of the virtual machine properties (WIN7/XP):

Have any favorites that aren’t GPO’s? (Sample GPO to come in a later post). Post in the comments.

Google’s Follow your World (or House)

2013-04-19T09:09:00.000-04:00

Google seems to have tons of products that they just turn loose on the public to see which ones take hold. They don’t always publicize them so you are sometimes on your own to find them. Yesterday, I stumbled across this neat one that will notify you via email when the Satellite imagery of a point of interest you define gets updated. Pretty interesting to see when the Google satellites snap a new picture of your house, neighborhood or other place of interest. Not available for Street Views though (unless there’s another random project I haven’t stumbled upon yet).

Login in and Check it out but depending on where you live, you might not get a notification for months or years. Google’s Follow Your World is not a good site those craving instant gratification.

Sam Jacobs presents at Citrix Synergy LA

2013-04-18T12:59:00.000-04:00

If you are attending Citrix’s Synergy this month in Los Angeles, be sure to attend the sure to be great Web Interface/Storefront session by Sam Jacobs of IPM. Sam has presented numerous times before at super technical BriForum and his presentations are always chock full of live demos and actual take away code to use on your own implementations.

Be sure to sign up and register. Seats fill fast!
Web Interface/StoreFront session

VMware Build number Decoder Table

2013-04-02T12:24:00.001-04:00

Ran across an EXCELLENT KB article in VMware's Knowledge Base this week.

Correlating vCenter Server and ESXi/ESX host build numbers to update levels (1014508)

If you have been working with VMware for a while, you will be familiar with the way various patches and hotfixes increment the build numbers within the products.

This document helps you correlate the various build versions back to the patches, updates and hotfixes installed. This is super useful since many of the KB articles and documentation refer to update levels and not build numbers for compatibility and prerequisites.

This Knowledge base doc covers all of VMware’s products. Although this document has been around since late 2011, I just ran across it recently. Definitely worth bookmarking.

Have you enabled the Turbo Button on your ESX hosts?

2013-03-28T16:30:00.000-04:00

If you haven’t checked the Power Management settings on your ESX hosts lately, you might be surprised to find your Processors set to use the Intel SpeedStep® technology. This technology ‘steps’ down a processor’s speed to save with power consumption. Most times I’ve run into this at clients, Balanced has been the default setting.

Feel free to save the world but only if you really want to…

Evernote searching just got a LOT better!

2013-03-25T11:51:00.001-04:00

If you know me, you know I am a huge Evernote user. I’ve basically gone paperless with the help of an iPhone camera and an Evernote premium account. Paper comes in, I snap pictures of it, add it to my Evernote account and the image becomes searchable from all my devices.

Previously, Evernote indexed and made searchable PDFs, text notes and Images (via OCR technology). Just recently though, Evernote has rolled out a great new searching feature to premium users called Document Search. Office Documents added to your Evernote premium account will now be indexed and searchable. For me, this is a GREAT addition and a solid feature rounding out a great product. I can now easily import all my Office documents into my Evernote account and find them using keywords from within the documents. Prior to this I would have to be sure to tag the notes appropriately to find things. Document Search will work with Documents, PowerPoint decks and Excel Files. Also iWork and OpenOffice formats are supported.

You can read more about the enhanced searching on Evernote’s Blog.

Upgrade those ESX 3.5 servers if you still have them …

2013-03-22T16:14:00.001-04:00

Ran into this wonderful error message today during a migration to vSphere 5.1. I didn’t realize that vCenter 5.1 no longer supports ESX 3.5 so now to get those poor Virtual Machines off of that decomposing hardware, I have been forced to build a temp vCenter 5.0 host and vCenter. Sure, there are other ways but this seems to be the easiest and safest way to get the machines out from the time warp they are currently trapped in.

So if you are wondering why you should upgrade every so often, know that it is way easier to take supported incremental steps rather than having to jump through hoops when you’ve fallen out of the supported upgrade paths.

Have you seen the new Windows 8 copy Dialog?

2013-03-05T17:13:00.001-05:00

I might be behind the curve for some of you who read my blog but I finally took the plunge and dove head first into the waters of Windows 8. New Ultrabook and new Operating System. I think the new laptop keyboard is actually giving me more problems than the new OS but more on that later. (Maybe).

One of the shiny new features I’ve noticed is the copy dialog box. Gone are the flying folders and useless time estimates and left in their place is a super useful dialog box with real-time stats and charts.

I like charts so, well done Microsoft.

Empty cubicle wall space? Get your PVS Boot poster here…

2013-02-27T08:45:00.000-05:00

Citrix just released a pretty useful Info Poster Diagram on the PVS Boot process. Here’s a quick summary taken from the poster:

The following summarizes the PVS Boot Process detailed on the diagram:

IP Acquisition – The Target Device acquires an IP address.

Bootstrap Download – The bootstrap file is downloaded.

PVS Logon Process – The Target Device logs on to PVS.

Single Read Mode – Single read mode communication is established between the Target Device and the PVS Server.

BNISTACK / MIO – The BNISTACK driver on the Target Device takes over communications with the PVS Server and Multiple I/O occurs.

Get the full printable poster here : http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX136378

From the Not So Surprising News Department–vSphere 5.1 Support for Latest XD/PVS.

2013-02-25T09:17:00.000-05:00

For those of you running Citrix XenDesktop 5.6 and Citrix Provisioning Server 6.1, you may or may not have upgraded to vSphere 5.1. If you checked on support in January, you would have noticed that Citrix was holding support validation at vSphere 5.0. The same held true for the latest versions of XenServer and Hyper-V as well.
As of February 1st though, Citrix has validated and updated support for vSphere 5.1. There are still some known issues related to XenDesktop 5.6 Feature Pack 1 but nothing that should be a show stopper in my opinion.
So feel free to upgrade to the latest and greatest version of your vSphere Hypervisor if you haven’t already.
The official CTX article is here.

Top Virtualization Blogs 2013 Voting (i.e. The vDundies)

2013-02-22T09:41:00.000-05:00

Virtualization is a pretty niche technology group. Not as small as it used to be though since now Virtualization encompasses all sorts of infrastructure components. The blogging community around these topics is a pretty tight knit one and it’s that time of year again that you as a reader have an opportunity to show your support for them.

Without getting all ‘Vote for me’ in this post, if you like the blog and enjoy the discussions, I’d love for you to go ahead and click the link to Vote for me. I’ve been in the top 100 blogs for a while now and it’s always nice to move up in the standings. (Sure, it’s a popularity contest but who doesn’t like being popular? )

This year I’m also up for Favorite Independent Blogger so be sure to click the radio box on that one as well! (Apparently I’m one of the few remaining bloggers that has been able to resist the temptation of being hired by one of the vendors.)

If you do vote, thanks for taking the time, thanks for reading, thanks for contributing and thanks for the support. I'm sure everyone else on the list feels the same way as well.

Voting closes 3/1.

Citrix PVS Support Webinar notes

2013-02-21T11:25:00.001-05:00

Attended a quick 1 hour webinar today on Citrix Provisioning Services 6.x.
(Citrix Support Webinar: Planning, implementing and troubleshooting provisioning services 6.x)

I think this is a series of Webinars by the good folks from Citrix Tech Support. Based on this one, it’s worth the hour to jump on and listen. Very technical, fast and full of higher level technical details. Not sales-ey at all.

I’m sure everyone on the call heard and took away different pieces of information but here are some of the tidbits I highlighted as interesting from my rough draft notes for anyone who may have missed it.

Single GB Network connection per 250 target clients: This was from a section on hardware minimums. Although later in the session, they recommended physical PVS servers over virtual, for anyone with Virtual PVS servers, I could draw a recommendation of no more than 250 target clients per PVS Virtual Machine. An easy rule of thumb metric for scaling out number of required PVS servers based on anticipated numbers of targets.

Network Ports should be set to PortFast Enabled: This is inline with the typical recommendations for VMware host network cards as well. When all your servers and targets are within the virtual environment, this should be taken care of already but something to take note of for any physical devices (Targets or Servers) in your streamed environments.

I’m sure there were plenty of other things that people found interesting and informative but these 2 jumped out at me. If you were on the call (there was about 700 – 800 people apparently), what did you find particularly interesting? Let us know in the comments.

Have a Dozen ESX hosts? PVS Boot ISOs might not scale well.

2013-02-11T08:22:00.000-05:00

There are a couple different ways you can design a Provisioning Services Server supported environment to boot up. Virtual Desktops can leverage PXE, Hard Drive or ISO. This week, a larger environment was set up with ISO boot disks and we ran into the following pattern detailed below.

Seemed like every couple (8 to be exact) VMs successfully registered with the DDC and then the next 2 failed. This pattern occurred down the list. After some Google-Fu, I stumbled across this VMware Forum post.

I believe in 4.x and 5.x the limit was 32 VMs that can have a file handle open. In 5.1 that increases to (I believe) 128. Also, in 4.x and 5.0, no more than 8 hosts can access a given file. In 5.1 this is increased to 32.

In our vSphere 4.1 clusters, we had 10 ESXi hosts. 2 more than the supported number of hosts that could establish access the ISO at any given time. Switching back to the vSphere console, we confirmed that all unregistered VMs were in fact isolated to 2 hosts.

Snowed In? Great time to Jailbreak your iPhone.

2013-02-08T13:59:00.001-05:00

With the upcoming Snowpocalypse on it’s way, I thought I would shoot out a quick blurb reminding those locked in the Apple iOS walled garden, that you can now break out again.

Check out evasi0n.com to find the Jailbreak program and walk your way through the whole process. It’s remarkably easy. Enjoy!

So why do I still Jailbreak? Like I’ve written before (Why I still Jailbreak my iPhone), there are still some tweaks that I find SO useful to the productivity of my iPhone that Apple hasn’t absorbed yet. After leveraging a stock iPhone 5 for the past few months, I still miss those tweaks. Here are some of my favorites.

~~Folder Enhancer~~
Folder Enhancer is a great tweak to the iOS that allows Folders within Folders. I used to love this hack a lot more. After a couple months without it, I am doing fine without it. Having a limit on the number of items in a folder actually makes me prune my apps a bit more on the phone. I’ve changed my behavior to adapt to the Apple limitations around folders. (For better or worse).

SBSettings/Activator
SBSettings is a tweak that really makes my iPhone complete. Combined with another tweak called Activator, I have it set up to allow me to double tap the status bar on top anywhere on the iPhone and get instant access to a screen of toggles controlling various features of the iPhone. I use it all the time to toggle WiFi on and off as I travel around. Sure, I could go to Settings, WiFi and do it there but this is super fast and useful. If you are on a capped data plan, this one is a sure fire hit to enable/disable data and associated charges.

SBSettings Theming – Date in Status Bar
I cannot tell you how much I missed this the last few months with the stock Apple iOS. I really hope that Apple eventually absorbs this into the main OS. Seems like such an easy implementation and is just super useful.

As always, if you have any must have tweaks, drop them in the comments for everyone!

Occupy Hotfix: Citrix PVS patches 66% complete.

2013-02-06T09:40:00.000-05:00

It’s always annoyed me to no end that Citrix’s Provisioning Services server hotfixes were manual hotfixes. Just a zip package with some binaries and a text file explaining where to drop them and what to register. A recipe for inconsistency and disaster in my opinion. A pretty good testament to my long standing annoyance is my tweet below to Citrix from August 2011:

<Sarcasm> Hey @CitrixSupport, can you make your PVS hotfixes any MORE manual? Maybe you can try distributing them uncompiled? </sarcasm>
Source: https://twitter.com/ccostan/status/104330883657502721

In last week’s King for a Day rant on Solarwinds, manual patching requirements were considered a capital offense. So I was especially happy to hear from my colleague Rajen Das, that Citrix will now be distributing proper installation hotfixes. (http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX136443 - Citrix Provisioning Services 6.1 Hotfix Packaging Policy) finally.

From CTX136433 : “To improve the customer experience, the Server and Console hotfixes will now be provided as an installation package only.”

Strange that it needed to be issued in a policy but glad to see it implemented. I assume target/client side hotfixes are still manual due the intricacies of streaming but I would still like to see them packaged up proper. Maybe in 2014.

King for a Day - What would you change?

2013-02-04T09:52:00.000-05:00

So over the past few weeks, I've had some really good discussions around patch management. The reasons why some people don't patch, the reasoning behind why people do patch, where it fits into an organization and who's role it typically falls under. All of the conversations have been great and it is clear to me that patching is not just clicking update and walking away. Patch management should be part of a robust, important and thought out procedure in almost every organization. Big and small alike, the processes and challenges are pretty similar for all of us.

For this discussion, I thought it would be interesting to play King (or Queen) for a Day. Looking back at the Patch Management process, if you had supreme powers, what would you change? How different would/could the processes look? No need to even ground it in reality if you feel strongly enough about it! :)

Let's start with reboots becoming a thing of the past. Patch an application or OS and NOT have to restart or incur downtime penalties?!? Revolutionary!

Expulsion from my computerized Kingdom for any vendor requiring manual patching. If you've packaged it up in a way that requires me to manually copy files or change registry entries, you haven't put enough time into your patch. This would be considered a capital offense in my fiefdom.

What would you do if you could just summon your subjects, wave your hand and make it so?

Originally published on http://thwack.solarwinds.com/thread/54104 - Please direct any comments there.

Minimum XenDesktop / PVS account access into vSphere needed.

2013-01-31T09:40:00.000-05:00

If you are looking to lock down the your XenDesktop/PVS service account’s access into the vSphere environment, you need to read Jarian Gibson’s post: http://jariangibson.com/2010/12/21/using-xendesktop-5-with-vmware/

He details all the rights necessary along with discrepancies between vSphere and Citrix’s eDoc terminology. Really useful stuff and invaluable for getting things working correctly in a locked down environment. After reading through his post though, if you just need to Cut and Paste a list of rights for your vSphere team to implement, here you go.

Custom vSphere Role for XenDesktop/PVS & XenDesktop Setup Wizards
Create a role in vCenter with the following permissions:

Datastore Permissions

Allocate space
Browse datastore
Low level file operations

Network Permissions

Assign network

Resource Permissions

Assign virtual machine to resource pool

System Permissions –
These permissions are automatically added when you create a role in vCenter.

Anonymous
Read
View

Task Permissions

Create Task

Virtual Machine/Configuration Permissions

Add existing disk
Add new disk
Change CPU count
Change resource
Memory
Remove disk

Virtual Machine/Interaction

Power Off
Power On
Reset
Suspend

Virtual Machine/Inventory

Create New
Create from existing
Remove
Register

Virtual Machine/Provisioning

Clone virtual machine
Allow disk access
Allow virtual machine download
Allow virtual machine files upload

Virtual Machine/State

Create snapshot
Revert to snapshot

Global

Manager custom attributes
Set custom attribute

Virtual Machine/Provisioning

Clone Template
Deploy Template

These rights have been vetted with Citrix XenDesktop 5.6, Citrix Provisioning Server 6.1 and vSphere 4.1 & 5.

Patching and Antivirus : Technology Doppelgangers?

2013-01-29T12:06:00.001-05:00

As I am sitting here thinking about Windows Patching, it strikes me that there are some real parallel threads among patching and Antivirus.

They both seem to be a necessary evil. AntiVirus software is notorious for wrecking applications. Support always has a sneaky suspicion that your Antivirus program is actively working against your business applications but you are obligated to run it. On the flip side, patching applications might just break them. It's a gamble. Fix one thing, break two more. You just can't be sure without properly testing.

Antivirus programs are mini patch managers. There probably is no better example of a program that needs almost constant updating and patching than an Antivirus program. Those definition files come out at a furious pace sometimes. Centralized patching and Antivirus definitions are critical to not bringing your network to a crawl during peak times.

Both Antivirus and Patching strategies have a security angle. They actually work hand in hand. One knocking down threats that probe and attack and the other closing holes and reducing attack surfaces for threats that are already there.

With all these similar and synergistic qualities, do you see Antivirus components and patch management a part of an overarching security strategy or separate and distinct solutions? With separate and distinct ownership and roles in the environment?

Originally published on http://thwack.solarwinds.com/thread/53912 – Please direct any comments there.

VNXe Software Update 2.4.0.20932

2013-01-28T14:24:00.001-05:00

If you haven’t logged into your VNXe Unisphere recently, you may have missed the newest software version released this month. (2.4.0.20932)

vStrong has the full release notes here :
http://www.vstrong.info/2013/01/11/emc-vnxe-series-version-2-4-0-20932/

If you are running VMware with NFS datastores, this release might be of interest to you.

Writable snapshots for VMware NFS-based datastores
VMware SRM support

Assuming you have a current support contract with EMC and you decide to do the upgrade, you can go to support.emc.com and open a Live Chat session to request that EMC do the upgrade. They have an arm of their Support Division that will perform remote upgrades. You provide them the maintenance window and they Webex in and execute. You can also do VNXe upgrades by yourself but really there is little benefit and if something were to go awry, you would have no air support. I like to recommend having the EMC Remote Upgrade team do it for this reason.

Don’t trust the Internets… Not all of them at least.

2013-01-25T15:00:00.001-05:00

^{Source: http://processchecker.com/file/CITRIX.exe.html}

Sure, you can probably find plenty of Thin Client users that will claim Citrix is a virus but I expect much more you, Internet!

Why do we Bother patching systems?

2013-01-23T09:15:00.000-05:00

So there are a bunch of reasons people patch their systems. In fact, there are probably more reasons people patch systems than why they wouldn't. (although there are some valid reasons NOT to patch things IMHO)
So why do you patch your systems? Seems like a pretty easy question except that the answers can be pretty varied and there is usually a bit of overlap.
Security? People patch all the time for security. Unpatched systems are just WAITING to be infected or exploited. No?
Application fixes? Stuff gets borked. ;) Vendors push out patches continuously to fix things that should have never made it out of beta testing.
Support compliance? If you are having any issue and call support, after pressing 1 for English, you are almost immediately directed to update to the latest hotfixes and patches for the particular product. 'Licensing issues? Patch and then we'll talk.' It can be almost comical at times.
Because? Some people just do it because they were told to.
Personally, since I deal primarily with new systems as a consultant, I patch for Application Fixes and Support Compliance. Keeping your systems secure usually falls under someone else (Namely the client). I rely on Firewall, Security, even Network guys to keep the Internet baddies out of my projects.
Oh and don't worry if you are silently thinking Because as your reason. That accounts for about 99% of the time I click Windows Update on my personal laptop.

Originally published on http://thwack.solarwinds.com/thread/53760 – Please direct any comments there.