Author: Wouter

[Advertorial]Vembu v3.9.0 is almost here

  By , ,

Introduction

Last year I wrote a couple of posts about Vembu, somewhere in the next couple of weeks they are expecting to release version 3.9.0 of their Backup Suite. They have some very new features to be added with this version like Windows Event Viewer integration. This gives the administrator a way to check if backups have succeeded without having to logon to the backup server, besides that it also provides an easy way with almost any monitoring product to make an status for the backups.

For those of you who still require data to be written to tape Vembu will also add that function trough the Vembu console. Besides VMware ESXi backups you will be able to quick recover Hyper-V Machines and Disk Image backups as well. Another important addition is the encryption of backups with AES-256 bit encryption, just make sure to safeguard that key or you might not ne able to recover anything.

Overview of announced changes:

Tape Backup Support

Vembu extends its support to native tape backup through the Vembu BDR console. You can
utilise the best known 3-2- 1 backup strategy of having 3 copies of backup data in 2 different
media and 1 off-site location for an efficient DR plan. This secondary backup approach will help
you to archive the image based backups in both virtual and physical environments like VMware,
Hyper-V and Windows Servers and recover them in multiple formats like VHD, VMDK,
VHDX, VMDK-Flat and RAW.

Auto Authorization at Off-site DR

Enabling the auto authorization feature will allow only the authorized Vembu BDR servers to get
connected with Vembu OffsiteDR servers (Replication) using the registration key.

Quick VM Recovery on ESXi for Hyper-V and Disk Image Backups

Instant recovery of backed up data on VMware ESXi is now made available for both the Hyper-
V VMs and Windows Servers backup jobs for an effective Disaster Recovery. This recovery of
the virtual machines happens in a matter of seconds by booting the backed up machine directly
from the backup storage repository, from where all the files, folders and applications can be
accessed.

Windows Event Viewer Integration

All the events of the Vembu BDR, Off-siteDR & agents like information on critical, warnings
and major events are updated in the Event Viewer of Windows Servers when enabled for better
management.

Advanced Backup level encryption for all agents

Users will be able to configure AES-256 bit encryption for all their backup jobs of VMware,
Hyper-V, Disk Image through their customized passwords using corresponding password hints
as well.

OffsiteDR Server retentions using Vembu Network Backup

OffsiteDR retention policies is now available for the Network Backup plugins too, like the image
based backups of VMware, Hyper-V and Disk Image backups at the too.

Listing of files & Folders in aciTree structure

The listing of files and folders while configuring backups on a Network Backup plugin is now up
with the aciTree structure for easy and quick navigation.

Pre/Post backup scripts for all Network & Image Backup clients

This feature provides the ability to configure running custom actions before and after the
execution backup schedule. The custom actions may include running an application using some
script files.

AngularJS conversion of UI for Vembu OnlineBackups

The overall UI of Vembu OnlineBackup is improved for better performance like the current
Vembu BDR and Off-siteDR.

Update of consumed space on the Vembu Portal

Based on the display of the consumed space of Vembu Online Backup and SaaSBackup plugins,
the customer will be able to allocate and purchase further cloud storage post purchase and
upgrade.

 

Goodbye 2017, hello 2018        

  By , , , ,

While I already finished my first blogpost of the year I decided it was time for me to write another one. The kind that I usually avoid like a plague to write: a post looking back at 2017 and forward to 2018. For me these kinds of posts are on the same level as stupid lists: I frigging always hated creating and evaded them! Essentially though my monthly flings posts are lists so why wouldn’t I write a the looking back & forward posts as well?

2017

Presenting

This mentality is exactly something what I started doing in 2016 and certainly continued in 2017: challenging myself to new things. The presenting bit I had already introduced myself to in 2016 but last year I also did my first presentation at a VMUG not in my own country but I travelled to Germany for their UserCon to present three of my favorite VMware flings. After the short vBrownbag at VMworld US in 2016 this was only my second time presenting in English. It also was my first time to exactly hit the spot timewise in the 30-minute timeslot I had.  Luckily the base for the presentation was good since I had done it at the Dutch VMUG UserCon (sorry it’s in Dutch) a couple of months earlier together with my good friend Hans Kraaijeveld. I had ten extra minutes though so instead of showing the slide deck I decided to show the tools instead of boring screenshots. Next time I just need to improve on some things and make a script on beforehand (thank you Johan for the Feedback) on what to do, but since I decided to change this the evening before in my hotel room preparation was suboptimal.

Besides the vmug’s I also managed to find me a spot on the vBrownbag schedule for VMworld Europe. I can’t really say that my presentation was a success, I was tired and just didn’t get into the proper flow for it. I did pick up some extra essential experience doing it though. Beside my own presentation I also had lots of fun on the vExpert daily broadcast.

Community

In 2017, I have started being more active on Reddit & VMTN. Specially reddit can be a flamewar every now and then but there are very decent topics and replies as well. On vmtn it’s really hit and miss about quality, some are decent posts but lots also prove that the ts (topicstarter) totally didn’t do their homework or have had any experience with the product they are trying to use.

The most fun community wise I had at the VMware Code Hackathon at VMworld EU. While our project didn’t go smoothly we had lots of fun and everyone learned at least a couple of things. Next time I will just make sure we have our own infrastructure available to us. And those hippie shirts simply rule.

VMworld itself was an awesome community event for me as well. While I still visited some sessions the hanging around with other vExperts and bloggers made it again an awesome event for me. At the beginning of November, I also visited the Nutanix .Next event and while there where less people over there that I knew I made some friends right away (or not Dugi?) and kept having fun with those selfies after I got some comments on looking grumpy at the first one. It was also good to finally meet some of the other NTC’s.

Events

2017 was a year with lots of awesome events for me. I visited not only the Dutch and German VMUG but also managed to squeeze the Belgium VMUG in my schedule was well. Then again VMworld EU and Nutanix .Next and in December I also visited the inaugural Dutch vEUC Techcon that had lots of great content.

Learning

In the learning zone, I managed more then I planned for in the beginning of 2017. I had agreed with my manager that it would be a quiet year for me an oh boy I did not keep myself to that agreement. First, there was the Certification ME work I did and got the certifications for: vcp-dcv 6.5, vcap7-dtm design and the vca-dbt exam. Ok this is not learning and doing the exam but by creating and checking the questions one can learn just as much in my opinion.

I did two actual exams in 2017: vcp7-dtm and vcap6-dtm deploy. The first one I passed and the 2nd one I sadly failed on, since it was my first vcap deploy I didn’t expect anything else and overall it was a good experience in preparing for the next one. Something certainly needed is an HD monitor and proper amounts of coffee in advance because the you need to stay sharp and time will be an issue.

As side projects in the learning department I also was active as content checker for three Packt videos and one book:

  • Videos
    • Learning VMware App Volumes
    • Designing and Deploying VMware Horizon View 7 and
    • Managing a Horizon 7 environment
  • Book
    • Mastering vSphere 6.5

Again, I learned a lot by working at these projects but they are very time intensive so I don’t know how eager I would be for coming projects.

 

2018

So, what am I expecting for 2018 personally? Hopefully I will be allowed again to speak at the Dutch VMUG Usercon, I proposed one personal session in the CfP and one session together with Hans Kraaijeveld. Also, I would love to extend my personal session and build it out to a VMworld quality and be able to deliver it there as well. Besides VMworld I would like to visit the BE vmug and Nutanix .Next also again this year.

In the community, I want to keep at least as active since my Nutanix NTC is already extended to 2018 and hopefully I will also receive vExpert again in 2018. The vExpert & NutanixNTC slack channels simply rock. Both have awesome vibes with lots of people always eager to help you with any questions you ask.

I only have one real learning goal so far for 2018 and that is to pass the vcap7-dtm deploy exam. Sadly, it hasn’t been released yet but that doesn’t say I can’t prepare for it either. My ultimate goal would be to become vcdx but that’s something I will only start working on this year, don’t expect me to submit soon. As something for fun, I might try my hands on the nsx certifications even though I am not a networking person or maybe something from Amazon since a lot of VMware admins seem to be heading that way as well.

 

For the rest, I have only this to add: Happy New Year and have an awesome 2018!

 

The VMware Labs flings monthly for December 2017

  By ,

Another month, another year, welcome to 2018 where I will continue this monthly series about updated and new VMware labs flings. This month there where two new fling: The Cross vCenter Workload Migration Utility and Simple Natural Language Processing for iOS plus three updated flings: VMware OS Optimization Tool, vSphere HTML5 Web Client, and last but not least the App Volumes Backup Utility. Some familiar faces and some not so familiar let’s see what changed:

[sta_anchor id=”xvcenterutil” /]

Cross vCenter Workload Migration Utility

The first Fling is the brand new Cross vCenter Workload Migration Utility, previously one had to go command line to move VMs across vCenter servers but now the less CLI inclined people (or lazy people like me sometimes) can do it via a gui. This can be done within the same SSO domain but also across SSO domains. WIlliam Lam also wrote a good post about it.

Key Features

  • Completely UI-driven workflow for VM migration
  • Provides REST API for managing migration operations
  • Works with vCenter not a part of the same SSO domain
  • Support for batch migration of multiple VMs in parallel
  • Supports both live as well as cold migration of VMs
  • Performs storage vMotion, not requiring shared storage
  • Flexible network mappings between source and destination sites

[sta_anchor id=”sios” unsan=”SiOS” /]

Simple Natural Language Processing for iOS

To be honest: i have no clue what Simple Natural Language Processing for iOS is for, looks like something to use in your code to talk to the voice processing in iOS without cost and privacy concerns for using cloud based solutions.

Simple Natural Language Processing for iOS provides developers with a convenient framework for integrating Natural Language Processing (NLP) into their iOS Apps. When the developer provides a set of training phrases, Simple NLP will use Naïve Bayes Classification to predict the intent of an unfamiliar phrase and extract parameters such as a person’s name and dates.

While numerous cloud based solutions already exist to provide similar functionality, they may have associated cost and privacy concerns. With Simple NLP for iOS, your data won’t be sent to a server or cloud service for prediction. All NLP functionality is constrained to the device and processed natively.

We hope that you will find this Fling easy to use and beneficial to your project.

[sta_anchor id=”osot” unsan=”OSOT” /]

VMware OS Optimization Tool

Just a short update for the OSOT this month, more tools have been coming out that can do this but this one is stall my favorite OS Optimizer.

Changelog

December 14, 2017

  • Template update. Detailed change log for each template is in the online version of each template (accessed from Public Templates tab)

[sta_anchor id=”appvol” /]

App Volumes Backup Utility

As far as I know this is still the only way to backup those Appstacks and writable volumes and using a fling for that might be a risk.

Changelog

Version 2.0

  • Updated to use only PowerCLI to connect to vCenter/vSphere. Previous versions used the vSphere SOAP API along with PowerCLI which locked the application to a specific version of PowerCLI. Versions 2.0 and later of this application will work with any version of PowerCLI (6.0 and later). This change improves the speed of enumerating vCenter items
  • Added additional checks for PowerCLI and PowerShell
  • Additional optimizations and minor bug fixes

[sta_anchor id=”vspherehtml5″ /]

vSphere HTML5 Web Client

Like always the HTML5 Web Client received multiple updates, two to be exactly in december.

Changelog

Fling 3.31 – Build 7343373

New Features

  • Performance charts counter selection can be persisted. The counter selection are persisted per object type. The data is persisted in browser local storage.

Bug Fixes

  • Resume fault tolerance in manual DRS cluster will show DRS recommendations.
Fling 3.30 – Build 7271216

New Features

  • View License assets (Host/Cluster/Solutions)(Read-only)
  • License and Products features details
  • VC and Host License details (Configure > Licensing)
  • VDS health checks

Improvements

  • Warning dialog when the file download is blocked by the Browser’s Pop-up blocker

Bug Fixes

  • Issue where host advanced settings filter doesn’t work in edit is resolved.

get-hvmachine only finds 1000 desktops

  By ,

Edit: this is supposed to be fixed already in the vmware.hv.helper module so make sure you have the latest version of it. I was late in writing it out :@

A while ago I wanted to list all desktops in use from one of our Connection servers. After several tries I kept having issues in finding some of the desktops. This prompted me to do a count on the amount with

(get-hvmachine).count

and it turned out that I received only a 1000 results while I had over 1100+ in that pod. After talking to some people in the VMware Code slack it turned out that this is a limit in the query system that the View API uses. This was verified by running the query myself instead of using the module. Sadly I forgot to make screenshots when I did this and don’t have access to this environment anymore.

$hvServer1 = Connect-HVServer -Server CONNECTIONSERVER
$Services1= $hvServer1.ExtensionData
$queryService = New-Object VMware.Hv.QueryServiceService
$defn = New-Object VMware.Hv.QueryDefinition
$defn.limit= 10000
$defn.maxpagesize = 10000
$defn.queryEntityType = 'MachineNamesView'

$QueryResults = $queryService.queryservice_create($Services1, $defn)
$queryresults.count

Despite setting the maximums to 1000 or not even filling them I always ended up with 1000 max. After again going over this on Slack I decided to create a do until to pull these results with each time a maximum of 1000 results until no results are received..

$hvServer1 = Connect-HVServer -Server CONNECTIONSERVER
$Services1= $hvServer1.ExtensionData
$queryService = New-Object VMware.Hv.QueryServiceService
$offset=0
$defn = New-Object VMware.Hv.QueryDefinition
$defn.limit= 1000
$defn.maxpagesize = 1000
$defn.queryEntityType = 'MachineNamesView'
$output=@()
do{
$defn.startingoffset = $offset
$QueryResults = $queryService.queryservice_create($Services1, $defn)
if (($QueryResults.results).count -eq 1000){
$maxresults=1
}
else {
    $maxresults=0
}

$offset+=1000
$output+=$queryresults
}
until ($maxresults -eq 0)

($output.results).count

For this I did make a screenshot:

As you see it kind of stacks the results but the count is ok so I should be able to incorporate this into other scripts.

The VMware Labs flings monthly for November 2017

  By , , ,

A couple of days late this time but here is your monthly dose of Flings! No new ones but seven flings have been updated by VMware labs this month. The Horizon Toolbox, vSphere HTML5 Web Client and the ESXi Embedded host client make their almost monthly appearances while at least two other received updates in a long time: Cross vCenter Vm Mobility – CLI and the VMFork for pyVmomi. The HCIBench and Desktop Watermark also received an update.

 


ESXi Embedded Host Client

By now we should all be using the embedded host Client unless you are forced by greater powers to run on some ancient version of ESXi.

Version 1.24.0 build 7119706 (Fling 19) – November 13, 2017

Minor features and bugfixes
  • GeneralFix failure to deploy OVF/OVA image with disks attached to multiple disk controllers
  • Address race condition when adding new Network Adapter to virtual machine
  • Allow datastore browser to browse VVOL datastores
  • Address timeout issue in datastore browser when client receives unknown datatypes from host
  • Address issue disabling autostart for a VM
  • Allow downloading of flat VMDK files in datastore browser
  • Show the correct VMware Tools version string in VM summary
  • Show pager in VM editor when VM has many hard disks
  • Support OVF properties with pre-defined values, showing dropdowns
  • Allow modifications of root user’s permissions
  • Support for selecting dependent PCI devices when enabling passthrough
  • Other minor bug fixes


vSphere HTML5 Web Client

Like always the HTML5 Web Client received multiple updates in November so the changelog is rather long.

Fling 3.29 – Build 7157335

New Features

  • Configure traffic filtering and marking rules on distributed port groups
  • Export and import distributed switches and distributed port groups

Improvements

  • Configure the policies of distributed port groups inside the New Distributed Port Group wizard

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed an error when trying to edit the settings of VMs with failed installation or update of the VM tools
Fling 3.28 – Build 7110681

New Features

  • Configure advanced CPU Identification Mask
  • Select PVRDMA adapter type for a VM network

Improvements

  • Thanks to the fling users who gave the steps to replace the certificates for FAMI UI running at port 5490, added these instructions to v4 of “Create a new certificate for a HTML5 client fling” document

Bug Fixes

  • Licensing views should be visible for 6.0 VC/PSCs
Fling 3.27 – Build 7055108

New Features

  • Popout the Datastore File browser
  • License Details
  • View License VC assets (Read-only)

Improvements

  • Set license name in the Add License workflow

Known Issues

  • License UI might not work against 6.0 VCs, in particular Windows VCs/PSCs.
  • If you see error in the vSphere Client (HTML5) similar to this – ‘getHostIsAssignLicenseActionAvailable’, then you can resolve this error by following below steps:
    • If vSphere Client (HTML5) Fling appliance is pointed to a vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA), then you should reregister the fling appliance by logging in to FAMI UI (or by running the config-ui CLI). Refer the instructions document to follow the steps for configuring Fling appliance for VCSA.
    • If vSphere Client (HTML5) Fling appliance is pointed to a Windows vCenter Server, then reregister by downloading latest server-configure.bat from the Download section of this website. Refer the instructions document to follow the steps for configuring Fling appliance for Windows vCenter Server.


VMFork for pyVmomi

This fling has been around for a while and if you ever wanted to fork your VM’s without having to study PowerCLi then this one is for you. It has a warning that it only supports vSphere 6.0 and 6.5 and no newer releases but hey there are none yet so please use it if you like.

Changelog

Version 1.0.3

  • Fixed a bug that prevented CreateChildSpec from being referenced in versions of 6.5 of pyVmomi
  • Updated the requirement to include pyVmomi 6.5 only, up from 6.0, due to a dependency issue

Version 1.0.2

  • Bug fixes & Improvements


Desktop Watermark

Want to make sure screenshots will show that it is your Image being used then the Desktop Watermark fling can be the tool of choice. It can be used for auditing or exhibition purposes or any other way you like. And yes that type in the changelog is a straight copy/paste from the site.

Changelog

Build 1027

Addition

  • Password protection for the configuration & uninstllation


Cross vCenter VM Mobility – CLI

Ever needed to migrate or clones VM’s form one vCenter to the other while there they are not linked? then the Cross vCenter VM Mobility – CLI might be a good tool in your toolbox.

Changelog

Version 1.4

  • While migrating multiple vms with destination network option, only one vm used to get migrated.This issue has been fixed.


HCIBench

Need to benchmark a Hyperconverged Infrastructure? VDbench is one of the tools to use and VMware labs create the HCIBench to automate this tool. It received a couple of updates since my last post about it.

Changelog

Version 1.6.5.1

  • Enhanced IP segment selection
  • Set open file limit to 4096
  • Updated vm-tools to the latest version
  • Bug fixes

Version 1.6.5

  • Enhanced 95th percentile calculation.
  • Added Curve and Multi Run calculation.
  • Added SSH Service validation.
  • Replaced DHCP Service with Static IP Service.
  • Added IP conflict check.
  • Fixed bunch of bugs.
  • Change the default client VM RAM from 4GB to 8GB


Horizon Toolbox

Being an EUC guy myself this is one of my favorites. The Horizon Toolbox adds some very good tools for servicedesk and operations employees.

Changelog

2017 Nov 30

  • Add a new “Export” button to the clients table

 

Nutanix .Next 2017 Nice: My Sessions

  By ,

Intro

Last week as you’ll probably already have seen I was at the Nutanix .Next 2017 Europe event in Nice, France. During this amazing event, I visited several sessions going from sales talks, via an NDA session to a deep dive. In this post, I will try to give a bit more information about the sessions I followed as far as I can do.

Disclaimer: this overview is based on notes written during the session and my memory and since specially the latter is not failsafe they could be some untrue things in this post. Please send the feedback directly to me so I can adjust them. Also, I don’t have equal amounts of text about all sessions because nothing is equal.

Nice disclaimer, right? This was just if the disclaimer all presenters had to read before starting their sessions. On screen, there was an even bigger one equally to the one showed during the keynote’s.

Index

These where the sessions that I followed:

Dell-EMC: 6 rules of disruption

VMware VDI On Nutanix

NX Files (NDA)

SOS Troubleshooting Nutanix

Puppet

Calm Deep dive

[sta_anchor id=”sixrules” /]

The six rules of disruption

While this clearly is a sponsored session only the middle part was commercial. Before and after that it was about those six rules and what they are according to them. I will give a bit more explanation about them that also might include my own opinion about them.

  • The interface is everywhere
    • It is, just think of your smartphone, Google home, an Echo dot or maybe your home thermostat. Everything has an interface these days. While voice commands where hard years back it has become really mature these days on some of those devices.
  • Remove the friction
    • If something doesn’t work flawlessly users will not accept it and the product will fail. Same with doing business, if it gets hard for a customer to do business with you they will go away and take their business somewhere else.
  • Prepare for abundance
    • With this they say that we should prepare for more and more data. Everything will have a sensor in the future, from the floor you walk on, trough the shoes you walk with up to the hat you have on your head. This will need to be handled somewhere.
  • Embrace non-linearity
    • With this they try to say we shouldn’t keep thinking the same way. Change needs and will happen and if you refuse to change you will lose.
  • Be honest
    • If you are not honest this will haunt you. In a world where a single tweet can bring down companies being dishonest might result in that tweet.
  • Be curious
    • If you don’t keep pioneering and developing yourself there is no way forward. If companies keep doing the same repeatedly they will fail in the end. Same with people, if I never learned anything new or would never think outside of the box I would have been unemployed for years already.

This was a fun session to follow and while the 6 points ‘coincidentally’ are generally the direction Nutanix is going they are also what lots of people see happening in the (near) future.

[sta_anchor id=”vmwarevdi” /]

VMware VDI on Nutanix

This session was meant to be presented by Brian Suhr but he managed to brake his leg the week before so he was replaced by Kees Baggerman of Nutanix and VCDX-DTM Sean Massey. I had to sit in front because I big mouthed Angelo Luciano to sit up front and Sean made me take his place. Me always with my big mouth. While a lot of the content in this session was already known to me it was good to see some of my knowledge once more confirmed and they presented us with some figures I would never have guessed. I always knew that optimizing an image is required but up to 50% performance was new to me. Also, they gave numbers to prove that data locality is essential for VDI. I can’t remember the exact numbers but there was a big difference with or without shadow clones enabled. This was a very good session that showed the audience on how to design a good working VMware View environment on Nutanix.

[sta_anchor id=”nxfiles” /]

NX Files

Since this was an NDA session there’s not a lot I can say besides that it contained presentations about ideas and product improvements that came out of the Nutanix Internal Hackathons. Only point I have about this session that it contained code samples that where hard to read since the text was too small.

[sta_anchor id=”sos” /]

SOS Troubleshooting

To start this session had some hard to read blue titles in the PowerPoint and too small text size ssh session screens. Content wise this session was about the tools you can use to manage and troubleshoot your Nutanix Environment like the alerting services, NCC, syslog, Pulse and Prism analysis. Further it went deeper into the thought process and framework required for successful troubleshooting.

Some of the key takeaways from this session where that an admin should always run NCC before logging a case. Also, Pulse should be enabled where possible and allowed. This sends only relevant information to Nutanix that contains no IP or data. This was a great session with heaps of technical information.

[sta_anchor id=”puppet” /]

Puppet

The presenter for this session introduced himself as an engineer but the first five minutes sounded commercial. Luckily, I had an excuse to escape since Sean Massey asked me to record a podcast about automating Horizon View with PowerCLI

[sta_anchor id=”calm” /]

Calm deep dive

Again, this was a good session to follow. Some of it might have been lost on me but Calm looks to be an awesome and easy tool to use. The real nerds will be able to dig deep into it though and can connect it to any automation tool already in use and can even create the json config files automatically using other tooling. Calm itself consists of two docker systems running on Prism Central, by default it will be disabled but once enabled (and maybe the ram for the Prism Central server(s) is expanded it will give access to just about anything you want to automate ranging from PowerShell to SSH, batch or the programming language you might prefer.

Nutanix .Next Europe report Day 2

  By , ,

Disclaimer: this post was written between 6 am and 7 am without having access to coffee.

So, that was the second and last day of .Next Europe 2017. The rush from day one continued with a great keynote where Nutanix launched their vision on how to handle IoT. The keynote itself started with the outtakes of yesterday’s clapping video which was funny and had a lot of beeps because of all the profanity.

Back to the IoT, within no-time there will be three billion devices but probably more that need to send their data somewhere. This will be way too much to send to the cloud. Nutanix will process this data in the edge and only send the valuable stuff to the cloud. For this even container are too big and even smaller entities will be handling that data. Sherlock is what Nutanix named this functionality and it will handle IoT devices as first-class objects and we will literally go from webscale to planet scale computing.

After this the CEO of Hyperloop came on stage to talk about the progress they have been making. Personally, I really see a future for this tech but I doubt if it can be done as cheap and as safe as what he is saying. The keynote needed with a tale about machine learning with a comparison of Big Blue beating the best chess player in the world years back by brute force to the best Go player in the world being beaten by using machine learning.

The second day of .Next I only did two break-out sessions. The first one was about troubleshooting and the tools and thought paths needed for that. The second one was a deep dive on Calm where we were shown all the bells and whistles wat can be really done with Nutanix’ new automation tool. I ended up in a 3rd session but it started with five minutes of sales crap so I was happy to escape so I could record a podcast with Sean Massey about Horizon View & PowerCLI.

The closing keynote was just awesome. There was some other thing being told but it was all about one of the good causes that Nutanix has been sponsoring during the .Next conference: Not Impossible. This is all about helping people and all started with CEO Mike Ebeling telling the family of a graffiti artist that he would make him able to draw again. Having no idea on how to tackle this he gathered a bunch of mad scientists and ended up doing it with cheap hardware and open source software; The Eyewriter. Their second project was project Daniel where he decided to create a cheap way to make artificial limps for a victim of the fighting in Sudan that had both his arms amputated. He developed techniques so the people in the refugee camps would be able to help each other with cheap 3d printers so artificial limbs went from 1000’s of dollars to 100’s of dollars.

With both these stories it was clear that Mike struck a nerve with the audience because at the end of his talk he received a well-deserved standing ovation. After this Nutanix announced the gathered a combined $11.000 for all four good causes: Not Impossible, Girls in Tech, Movember and the Fabien Cousteau Ocean Learning Centre

Nutanix .Next Europe report Day 1

  By ,

To repeat an earlier phrase: ooooh what a rush. Yesterday was a great day in a perfectly named Acropolis where Nutanix is holding its second .Next Europe. Being one of the 2200 attendants in an atmosphere that really feels vibrant is awesome. Due to security and busses leaving late from hotels the Keynote (with my mugshot in there since I am a Nutanix Technology Champion) began 15 minutes late but made up that lost time by ending 45 minutes late. The only other point about the keynote was that it went a lightning speed. As techs, we managed to follow everything but I am 100% sure that a lot of people didn’t manage that.

In here we saw some new features of the 5.5 release, new tools and performance charts that are just unbelievable. The fact that they did demos on stage made it even better. The key thing from the keynote for me is that everything will be about simplicity. If apps/tools can’t be consumed very easily they will never be as successful as apps that are and the mantra of More Tea Less Clicks will probably appeal to everyone although some people might name it More Life Less Clicks or More Beers Less clicks.

Due to the keynote running late I missed my first session about xtract since I really wanted to visit with my fellow NTC’s at our lunch. It was good to finally meet the people behind the names with Sudheesh Nair making a surprise visit. He was almost literally pulled from the hallway by Angelo Luciano when he walked by.

My first session was from Dell about the six rules of disruption. This session told an obvious story with a little bit of product marketing in between. Nothing too much but hey a vendor has to sell so things, right? The second session I did was a Horizon View on Nutanix session. This was supposed to be done by Brian Suhr but he broke his leg last week so Sean Massey (VCDX-DTM) and Kees Baggeman had to replace him. They had some good takeaways and performance tips and tricks for the audience. Both sessions will be covered more extensively in a later post. I will not be able to do that with my last sessions since this was an NDA session with new tools and features that might or might not end up in final products presented by the engineers who created them at one of the Nutanix Hackathons.

The evening keynote started with a small fireside chat about politics and economics and how they influence each other. After this Fabian Cousteau came on stage for a very inspiring talk about the sea and how it impacts everything on our world. He had a very good tale and awesome videos to show. I visited the reception at the convention floor for a short while but did not go to the party. I was getting tired and since I am not really a party person I probably would have left early anyway. I saw some pictures that they had a big tent at the beach and that was food since there was a good thunderstorm when I left the venue.

Updated and new VMware Labs Flings for Oktober 2017

  By , ,

“Listen very carefully; I shall say this only once.”

Even after years this for me is one of the best quotes from any comedy series. Allo Allo always was so much fun to watch even though it looks pregistoric these days in video quality. For the people who don’t know Allo Allo please check out Michell from the resistance saying it herself over here. This months version of this post has two new flings and two updated ones. As almost always the vSphere HTML5 Web Client makes an appearance with the Horizon Toolbox as secondant, as you can see they have dropped the version number for the toolbox. New ones are the Blockchain on vSphere and the Desktop Watermark.

[sta_anchor id=”new” unsan=”New” /]

New Flings

[sta_anchor id=”watermark” unsan=”Watermark” /]

Desktop Watermark

Desktop Watermark is a Windows native application that adds a watermark to a desktop for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) auditing or exhibition purposes. A watermark has the ability to be visible or invisible. Invisible watermarks, seen in the screenshot, can be revealed by a tool bundled in the Fling. The tool should be configured by an administrator and enforced on the end user’s desktop.

Changelog
Build 1019
Issue Fixes
  • Windows 10 – Installation failure on some machine with domain account
  • Issue fix – Windows 10 – During uninstallation the service is not automatically stopped

[sta_anchor id=”blockchain” unsan=”Blockchain” /]

Blockchain on vSphere

Blockchain is an emerging technology which has been gaining traction globally throughout the past few years. Industries like finance, logistics, and IoT are actively working on research and pilot projects using blockchain.

Fabric is a sub project under Hyperledger (a LinuxFoundation project), it is probably the most mature blockchain solution available now for business use cases.

The mission of Blockchain on vSphere is to provide an end-to-end blockchain solution, from IaaS, to Blockchain platform and Blockchain applications. It allows organizations to quickly collaborate and evaluate the new business models and processes by using the decentralized blockchain technology.

By using BoV, blockchain developers can quickly set up an environment to build and test their blockchain applications.

Changelog

Not yet

[sta_anchor id=”updated” unsan=”Updated” /]

Updated Flings

[sta_anchor id=”toolbox” unsan=”Toolbox” /]

Horizon Toolbox

Good old Horizon toolbox as said dropped its version number but continues to give you some features that the regular View Admin doesn’t have. Auditing on client versions, snapshots, usage and others are the great additions this tool gives.

Changelog

2017 Oct 12

  • Auditing – Clients are enhanced
  • Horizon 7.3.1 is supported
  • Some bugs are fixed

[sta_anchor id=”webclient” /]

vSphere HTML5 Web Client

What do I need to say about this one? Just update you’re existing version and enjoy this almost perfect vSphere client.

Changelog
Fling 3.26 – Build 6984758

New Features

  • License Products Details
  • Add New License action

Improvements

  • Enhanced the performance of the Datastore File Browser

Known Issues

  • If you see error in the vSphere Client (HTML5) similar to this – ‘getHostIsAssignLicenseActionAvailable’, then you can resolve this error by following below steps:
    • If vSphere Client (HTML5) Fling appliance is pointed to a vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA), then you should reregister the fling appliance by logging in to FAMI UI (or by running the config-ui CLI). Refer the instructions document to follow the steps for configuring Fling appliance for VCSA.
    • If vSphere Client (HTML5) Fling appliance is pointed to a Windows vCenter Server, then reregister by downloading latest server-configure.bat from the Download section of this website. Refer the instructions document to follow the steps for configuring Fling appliance for Windows vCenter Server.
Fling 3.25 – Build 6929189

New Features

  • Edit the properties and policies of distributed ports
  • Licenses list
  • License Products list (Read-only)
  • Rename and Remove License action
  • You can now deploy VM from a VM template by choosing New VM wizard > Deploy from template > Data center tab

Improvements

  • Rescan storage action is done in parallel when is executed on Cluster or Datacenter level
  • Replication groups can be managed through Edit VM Storage Policy action
  • Showing the number of pending upload sessions and size uploaded in Datastore File Browser

Bug Fixes

  • Template icon missing issue is resolved
  • After creating some Tags or accessing the Content Library and leaving the H5 client idle, the UI starts to spin and fails to display requested info. The following error starts to appear constantly: “The query execution timed out because of a back-end data adapter ‘com.vmware.vise.data.adapters.core.DataServiceCoreAdapter’”. This bug is fixed in this release and the time out error should no longer appear.

Known Issues

  • If you see error in the vSphere Client (HTML5) similar to this – ‘getHostIsAssignLicenseActionAvailable’, then you can resolve this error by following below steps:
    • If vSphere Client (HTML5) Fling appliance is pointed to a vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA), then you should reregister the fling appliance by logging in to FAMI UI (or by running the config-ui CLI). Refer the instructions document to follow the steps for configuring Fling appliance for VCSA.
    • If vSphere Client (HTML5) Fling appliance is pointed to a Windows vCenter Server, then reregister by downloading latest server-configure.bat from the Download section of this website. Refer the instructions document to follow the steps for configuring Fling appliance for Windows vCenter Server.
Fling 3.24 – Build 6862396

New Features

  • Ability to customize all network properties, incl. default gateways, when applying GOS customization spec to a VM (during cloning or customizing GOS on existing VM)
  • Add NVMe controller for an existing VM or for a new VM

Improvements

  • Enhanced Compatibility details view in VM provisioning wizards

Known Issues

  • Fling appliances pointed to vCenter 6.5 seems to have timeout issues. These issues are being investigated and are not related to fling itself. In some cases, restart the Fling Appliance could solve this problem
  • If you see error in the vSphere Client (HTML5) similar to this – ‘getHostIsAssignLicenseActionAvailable’, then you can resolve this error by following below steps:
    • If vSphere Client (HTML5) Fling appliance is pointed to a vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA), then you should reregister the fling appliance by logging in to FAMI UI (or by running the config-ui CLI). Refer the instructions document to follow the steps for configuring Fling appliance for VCSA.
    • If vSphere Client (HTML5) Fling appliance is pointed to a Windows vCenter Server, then reregister by downloading latest server-configure.bat from the Download section of this website. Refer the instructions document to follow the steps for configuring Fling appliance for Windows vCenter Server.

Removing faulty Horizon desktops using PowerCLI

  By , ,

So last week there where a couple of posts on vmtn about people wanting to automatically removing or refreshing faulty Horizon desktops. With faulty I mean desktops in Agent Unreachable or in error state or whatever status are available. Since this was something i had been investigating anyway I decided to make a script for it that had separate menu’s for the status the desktop needs to be and to pick the desktop to be deleted. The latter part can be rebuild to do all those desktops at once  in case something breaks pretty badly during a recompose of the pool.

The largest part of the script is for creating the menu’s. Since the amount of returned desktops is variable and names differ it’s not possible to use a static menu. Instead I have used a menu structure created by Roman Gelman and that can be found inside this script on github. The part that gets things done i have listed below. The $spec array doesn’t need to be created but it is required in the API call to remove the desktop, Powershell assumes everything true by default when it’s empty but it just has to be called otherwise you will get a big fat red error. To remove multiple desktops at once machine_deletemachines needs to be used with an array filled with desktop id’s and $spec.

$spec = New-Object VMware.Hv.machinedeletespec
$spec.deleteFromDisk=$TRUE

$desktops=@()
$desktops=get-hvmachine -state $targetstate
$selectdesktop=@()
foreach ($desktop in $desktops){
    $selectdesktop+= New-Object PSObject -Property @{"Name" = $desktop.base.name
    "ID" = $desktop.id;
    }
}

$selectdesktop=write-menu -menu ($desktops.base.name) -header "Select the desktop you want to remove"
$removedesktop=$desktops | where {$_.base.name -eq $selectdesktop}


try {
	$services1.machine.machine_delete($removedesktop.id, $spec)
	#$services1.machine.machine_reset($removedesktop.id, $spec)	
	write-host "$selectdesktop will be marked for deletion" -ForegroundColor Green
}
catch {
	write-host "Error deleting $selectdesktop" -ForegroundColor Red
}

As always the complete script can be found at Github where it will also be updated. This is how it looks in the end:

Update

After the comment below I decided to create the script to delete all desktops in a certain state. It’s a variation of the script above, just a bit shorter. Again it can be found on Github. Please be aware that due to a limitation in get-hvmachine both these scripts will only handle 1000 desktops at a time. It is safe to just repeat the script to do the rest.

https://github.com/Magneet/Various_Scripts/blob/master/remove_faulty_VDI_desktop.ps1

https://github.com/Magneet/Various_Scripts/blob/master/remove_multiple_faulty_VDI_desktops.ps1