Just like in 2017 and 2018 I have been named a Nutanix Technology Champion for 2019. While I haven’t been involved with the tech as much as in 2017 at least I tried to keep up to speed in 2018 by playing with the community Edition. Besides that I started two things on the Nutanix front in 2018: getting an NPX bootcamp to The Netherlands which I attended in September and trying to start a Nutanix User Group in The Netherlands and that will have it’s first meeting the 1st quarter of 2019! Besides that I attended the Nutanix .Next on tour event in Utrecht and of course .Next EU 2019 in London.
Being an NTC is for me all about the vCommunity, we try to help others but if we need a hand others will help you as well. Just ask Nutanix’ awesome community manager Angelo Luciani and he will tell you all about it 😉
2018 has been awesome but I am 100% sure that 2019 will be even better!
The VMware Workspace ONE Provisioning Tool helps you test and validate your applications (exported as a .ppkg file) and the special-purpose unattend.xml configuration file as part of the Dell Provisioning for Workspace ONE offer. This tool simplifies the testing and validation of this process in your own environment before these files are sent and applied in the Dell factory.
Highlights
Simple UI to easily enable the IT admin to validate their ppkg and unattend.xml files in their own environment, mimicking what Dell is doing in the factory.
Supports PPKGs and unattend.xmls generated with Workspace ONE UEM Console 1811 or newer.
Highly flexible. Allows IT admins to specify the configurations for tool in a text based config file in order to change things like tool timeout and report location, to name a few.
Generates a detailed final summary report with client details and app installation results. This file is saved in C:\ProgramData\Airwatch\UnifiedAgent\Logs\PPKGFinalSummary.log after the “Full Process” button is clicked.
Halts the process if any steps fails for the given operation, giving the ability to IT admins to view & debug the state of the machine and the apps.
Supported Operations
Apply Apps Only – Given a ppkg, this tool deploys the applications on a test windows machine
Apply Full process – Given a ppkg and xml file, this tool deploys the applications on a test windows machine followed by Workspace ONE enrollment and Sysprep.
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Dispatch-Solo
The Dispatch-Solo fling actually is a prepackaged VM to get you started with dispatch as easily as possible.
Dispatch-Solo is lean version of Dispatch which has been packaged as VM appliance. The goals of Dispatch-Solo are simple:
Lower the barrier to entry – get started with Dispatch in a matter of minutes
Support nearly the full Dispatch feature set – API compatibility
Explore use-cases – get user feedback and iterate
Because Dispatch and serverless is still in its infancy, understanding use cases is the highest priority. It therefore makes sense to continue to focus on getting Dispatch in as many hands as possible and making it as easy as possible to get started exploring its usage. By packaging Dispatch-Solo as a VM appliance, getting started is quick and predictable.
This Android Device Pre-Verification Suite Fling reduces the time to perform a preliminary test on any Android device from any OEM. Pre-verification result decides whether the device is eligible for a full device verification program or not. This eliminates the TAT (turnaround time) for basic test failures during the initial phase of verification from VMware. Customers/Partners can run this tool at their premise and check whether the device passes the device verification program entry criteria.
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PowerCLI for VMware Cloud on AWS
If you are using VMware Cloud on AWS the PowerCLI for VMware Cloud on AWS fling will give you an preview on what to expect from PowerCLI to automate VMC.
This Fling provides a community preview of the upcoming PowerCLI commands for managing VMware Cloud on AWS. It comes in the form of a single PowerCLI module and integrates with existing PowerCLI modules.
All commands have been automatically generated. They are still in development, contain known issues, and will change in the future.
Updated
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PowerCLI Extensions
The PowerCLI extensions fling gives you a preview on what to expect in the official PowerCLI releases.
Changelog
Version 3.0.0.11173018
Updated PowerCLI.Extensions Module to be compatible with VMware PowerCLI 11.0.0
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HCIBench
This one should be known by now, the HCIBench is made for benchmarking your hyperconverged infrastucture. Ideal for things like vSAN but please be aware that it could also possibly be tuned for that.
Changelog
Version 1.6.8.7
Enhanced easy-run, put original 4k,70% read as the first test case, then 4k, 100% read and 256k, 100% write
Enhanced tvm deployment validation
Added Checksum into easy-run consideration
Updated guest VM template with increased ring_pages and disk scheduler
Added DNS configuration guidance into welcome message
Version 1.6.8.5
Added 2 more test cases into easy-run, 4k 100% random read and 256k 100% sequential write
Batch deployment will be involved if deploying more than 8 VMs to speed up deployment process
Allow user to choose IP prefix when using static IP
Optimized UI to allow user to review the results by single click
Fixed regression issue when placing Datacenter/Cluster in the folder
The vSphere PKS Plugin provides a user interface for managing and monitoring Kubernetes cluster deployments for the PKS platform. Using the vSphere PKS Plugin you can view details about your Kubernetes clusters, including master and worker nodes as well as networking configuration.
Features
The vSphere PKS Plugin:
Provides a graphical interface to visualize the Kubernetes clusters deployed and managed by PKS
Provides visibility into underlying infrastructure such as VMs, network objects and storage objects that are created when a Kubernetes cluster is deployed in a vSphere environment
Provides a centralized launch point for viewing components deployed with the Kubernetes cluster, including nodes and network objects such as routers, logical switches, load balancers
Provides a simple user interface to get easy access to the cluster using the kubectl interface and the cluster Dashboard
Remember registered site information (without password)
Easily retry a previously attempted task in case of failures
Search box for keyword filtering of migration task history
Option to clear task history by removing completed tasks
Added documentation and other links under the help menu
Partial fix for an issue related to duplicate network names
Workspace ONE Configuration Tool for Provisioning
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The Workspace ONE Configuration Tool for Provisioning assists in building unattend.xml configuration files that can be used by Dell (or others when more provide the service) when delivering systems from the factory to set them up for your environment.
Changelog
Release Update – Version 2.0.0
Improvements
The version number is shown in the window title
The version number is shown as a comment in the generated XML
The product key is now validated to conform with the 11111-11111-11111-11111-11111 pattern
Split the locale settings into ‘Operating System Language’, and ‘Region and Keyboard Settings’.
‘Operating System Language’ maps to the language of the operating system installation media, and ‘Region and Keyboard Settings’ maps to the locale settings available to the user during OOBE
‘Operating System Language’ is now a required field as it is needed for certain customizations, such as adding a user to the administrators group
Removed the ability to set a custom computer name. The computer name now defaults to ‘*’, which causes the Windows OS to generate a random name, taking up to seven characters from the ‘Registered Organization’ field plus eight random characters. This change makes sure every computer has a unique name on the network.
The ‘Auto Admin Logon’ feature is no longer selectable. Instead, it will be activated when it is required by the deployment scenario.
All deployment scenarios now allow for the creation of a local user.
Moved the node from the ‘oobeSystem’ pass to the ‘specialize’ pass
to be consistent with the node
Bug Fixes
Auto Admin Logon would only work with an unattend XML generated for an en-US installation image
Enabled the ASSIGNEDTOLOGGEDINUSER=Y flag to enable the WS1 agent to correctly enroll the user in the ‘Workgroup’ deployment scenario
Fixed an issue where the ‘Show Privacy Settings’ option would have no effect
This post is fairly similar to my posts for .Next Nice in 2017 and VMworld US of this year. For security reasons I decided to go with the XD Design Bobby again. Since it’s a lot harder to open when on my back I feel it’s a bit more secure while travelling on the London Underground. A couple of other changes also have been made, the bubm bag was replaced by a bit smaller pouch from the same maker and my Sony headset has gone to my wife since I settled on the Jabra Move I got from Cohesity at VMworld. The Jabra just sits a bit more comfortable for me and fits perfectly in it’s own bubm case.
For the rest there are the usual suspects: Xiaomi 10k battery pack, HP Probook 440 G5, Microsoft designer mouse, Roundcube Rewirable USB Travel adapter and some various bits & pieces. My suitcase is simply packed with lots of stroopwafels and all the Nutanix NTC gear I have.
Like I said in part two I wanted to do that first before going to method’s since for some methods you actually need the output from a query. I posted an example of that in the meanwhile with my post about sending messages to users. The get-hvglobalsession and get-hvlocalsession are based on queries that are used for the Session_SendMessages method of the session service.
The obvious way of finding available methods is by looking into the API Explorer.
It’s a complete list but it’s hard to find all the methods that belong to a service. It’s easier to do a get-method on a service.
$services1.connectionserverhealth | gm
So, in here we have two methods: ConnectionServerHealth_Get and ConnectionServerHealth_List. Even my wide PowerShell window is not big enough to show what’s needed to with the ConnectionServerHealth_Get method. For that we can use service.method without any brackets.
The required input for the method’s is visible between the brackets. The _Get method requires an id of the type vmware.hv.connectionserverid and the list doesn’t even need an input. I will keep the first one to use for later while I run the latter one.
The ones where you see a property that has a definition that starts with vmware.hv…. has more content hidden. It is possible to access these by putting the entire line between brackets followed by .membername for example
Please be aware that this can go multiple levels deep for some methods. To avoid unneeded api calls it’s wise to declare a variable from the method and use that to access the data.
Now to show the use of the _get method I could use the id that I received from the _list method but that would be cheating. What I will do is put a list of all connectionservers into an array (even though I only have 1) and do a foreach with the _get method.
$connectionservers=$services1.ConnectionServer.ConnectionServer_List()
foreach ($connectionserver in $connectionservers){$services1.ConnectionServerHealth.ConnectionServerHealth_get($connectionserver.id)}
This is the basic usage for method’s. For some method’s a spec is required for input please take a look at this post about adding an instantclone administrator for an example. I will show some more details about that one in here. Let’s take a look at what the method requires as input.
You can see that a spec is required of the type VMware.Hv.InstantCloneEngineDomainAdministratorSpec. The API Explorer will show that this actually is a bit weird one since it one contains a base.
If you click on the base you’ll see whats required in there.
These levels actually show that we need to declare multiple objects to build the actual spec. You can create the basic object with new-object objecttype
As you see the base is empty and doesn’t know what data it can contain. This shows that we need to declare the object for every level where we need to enter some information.
First I tried this using the class that’s shown in the API explorer, this obviously didn’t work so I use the data object name.
In the link I posted above you should be able to find what’s required to create an actual instantcloneadministrator. With this I have covered most of the method’s and how they work. Please don’t assume that _list nevers needs an id or that _get always needs one because that’s not true. Sometimes it will also say ids like with my previous post about sending messages that means it needs an array of id’s most possibly generated by a query or an _list method.
I got the question today from Fabian Lenz if it is possible to send messages to end users using the Horizon API. I knew I had seen it somewhere already and here’s a quick explanation.
There are two method’s to do this, one for a single session and the other for a group of sessions. Both fall under the session service.
$services1.session | gm
You can see both the methods called session_sendmessage and session_sendmessages if we look at what’s required for both we see that the difference is a single sessionid or an array of session id’s.
Let’s see what the API explorer says what’s needed.
So the msgtype is a string that can have three values and the message is just a string, let’s test this.
I am lazy and will use get-hvlocalsession for the sessionid.
$session=get-HVlocalsession | select -first 1
I do the -first 1 so it isn’t an array but a single session.
Now let’s send a message.
$services1.session.Session_SendMessage($session.id,"INFO","This is a test message for retouw.nl at 30-10-2018 19:13h")
And the result:
Now let’s do the same for multiple sessions.
$sessions=get-HVlocalsession
$services1.session.Session_SendMessages($sessions.id,"ERROR","This is a test message with multiple recipients for retouw.nl at 30-10-2018 19:25h")
And to show that this also works for global sessions (both where connected to pod2cbr1)
$sessions=get-HVglobalsession
$services2.session.Session_SendMessages($globalsessions.id,"WARNING","This is a test message with multiple global recipients for retouw.nl at 30-10-2018 19:30h")
If you want to filter the sessions on user or machine name you can filter the $globalsessions on $globalsessions.namesdata.basenames
This week it was announced that applications for the 2019 Nutanix Technology Champions (NTC) are open. Despite not having worked with Nutanix in production in a while I have been a member of this great piece of vCommunity for two years now. Angelo, who runs the program, listed the benefits to include the following:
Early access briefings about Nutanix products and announcements
Access to private betas and insight into ongoing product development
Participation in exclusive meetings with engineering teams
Access to discussions on the Nutanix NTC slack channel with internal teams
Exclusive activities at our annual .NEXT conference including pre-show briefings
Support and Mentorship for those seeking NCP, NCAP and NPX career development
Let’s dive into these benefits a bit deeper.
Early access briefings about Nutanix products and announcements
Since I don’t work with the tech this is what really keeps me up to speed on what Nutanix is doing. While sometimes it’s hard for them to do it really early with the fast pace of developing new features or tools this still gives the edge for bloggers who like to blog about this. But it also gives us the possibility to provide feedback before it’s released for new ideas or enhancements.
Access to private betas and insight into ongoing product development
Again due to the high pace of developing at Nutanix the first part doesn’t happen too often but the second one does every now and then. Engineers pitch ideas during regular calls and use our reactions to those to see if it would be worth implementing.
Participation in exclusive meetings with engineering teams
See the previous point, it’s really valuable for both sides to give and receive the input on new developments.
Access to discussions on the Nutanix NTC slack channel with internal teams
Being a customer or partner this is the icing on the cake for you. Besides communicating with your fellow NTC’s every Nutanix employee can have access to our Slack Channel. I have been on the phone with support during an issue while on Slack I was able to give logs and other information that otherwise might have taken a bit more time to end up on their side. In here there are no stupid questions and if the person with the required knowledge isn’t in the channel someone else will invite them in. And it isn’t about Nutanix software only, if someone at Nutanix has the knowledge we will get them in there. Want to ask CEO Dheeraj Pandey a question? He’s in there as well!
Exclusive activities at our annual .NEXT conference including pre-show briefings
We always have a NTC lunch at .Next and several briefings up front so we know what to expect. Angelo is also a selfie maniac at conferences so you probably won’t get away without one posted on Twitter. Everywhere you go you’ll find another NTC around so like most conferences it’s a great place to make new and meet old friends.
Support and Mentorship for those seeking NCP, NCAP and NPX career development
For this again the Slack channel is essential. After a call about the NPX certification ealy this year I pitched the idea to have a bootcamp in The Netherlands and that turned out to be a success as you can see in my blogpost about it.
Other things
Are there any other advantages than those that Angelo names? Yes there certainly are, all NTC’s get a free subscription to Pluralsight and on a regular base we have calls with vendors that also supply us with nfr licenses. For example we have access to hycu, Bitdefender and after the comming call also Unitrends.
Conclusion
It doesn’t matter if you are a partner, customer or member of the greater vCommunity being a member of the NTC program is great benefit. Angelo really strives to help us grow in whatever we do and succeeds in that! If it isn’t about the knowledge then it is about expanding your network in this awesome thing that we call the vCommunity.
I have done a lot of deep dives but just like the VMware{Code} session I did at VMworld I think it’s time to go back to the basics on how to work with the Horizon api’s from PowerCLI. First up is connecting to a Connection server and disconnecting. I will be showing various ways to do but the new and secure one is the best for me since that’s also usable when you want to schedule scripts.
The easy way
The easiest wat to connect is by using the connect-hvserver SERVERNAME
connect-hvserver pod1cbr1
This will give you a nice credentials popup.
The Unsecure way
The previous way that I used was by using the -user, -pass and maybe the -domain parameters.
Since one of the latest updates it is also possible to use a credential object. We found this out during the Hackathon @VMworld US that it is possible. It will use the good old credentials function from Powershell like in this post from 2008. First you’ll need to make a file with the encrypted password. Big thanks to Ariel & Edgar 🙂 check this for the vDocumentation script.
There’s a little bit more to it so you can actually use the api’s. First we need to put the session into a variable. I always use a number so it’s easy to separate my various pods.
After a Nutanix Technology Champions websession we had earlier this year I thought it was a good idea if there would be one in The Netherlands. The only requirement was to supply at least 12 people and also to leave some spots for Nutants. While I reached out to the current NTC’s Bert van der Lingen reached out to the NPP’s he trained in the Netherlands. It didn’t take long before we had enough people interested to start the process. The location was also arranged quickly at the Dutch Nutanix offices while the date was set for september 24-28th.
The coaches
Since we had 25 people signed up for the bootcamp there where three coaches assigned for this week: Tim Buckholz (NPX #12), Bruno Sousa (NPX #15) and Crescenzo Oliviero (NPX #16). Including in their coaching role they also where the Nubank customer for whom we had to create a new design. While being the customer we had to ask the right questions but if we weren’t sure about something they also showed great patience with us in explaining things.
The Bootcamp
In the time leading up to the bootcamp itself I was still apprehensive about my own (lack of) experience but lots of people told me that it shouldn’t be a problem. I went in with an open mind that it would be a great learning opportunity. Looking back at the week this was the best way to look at the process. No matter what you designed the NuBank customer always managed to find flaws and gave good feedback on what was lacking but also on what was good.
One constant factor was change! The first day was a shock to most: Sizing can be rather difficult you know. On each day new tasks were added like networking, storage but also Business Critical apps and VDI you could expect curveballs to be thrown at any time! For this my open mind probably was a bonus because it was clear some people had issues with this. If you didn’t care about failing but still did the best you could in building the designs you would learn the most in my opinion. During the week we also learned to ask more and more questions to the customer, something we hardly did during the first day.
During the afternoon on day four it was time to build that last design so we could do a proper defence of it for the Nubank customer. For the presentation each team had 45 minutes and time management was difficult. It’s really easy to go down a rabbit hole in explaining nerd knobs while there is no time for that.
Even during the last presentation it was clear that the newly tech created during the week was needed in some cases. Our team required wireless ipmi while others had wireless load balancers, wireless 40GB lines and other wireless stuff.
For myself I consider this one of the best weeks of learning I have ever done. There’s hardly anywhere to work with a such a group of dedicated and motivated people. And it proved even more how good and important the vCommunity is in sharing knowledge and caring for others.
VMware Horizon Session Recording allows administrators of a VMware Horizon environment record their users activity in their Blast Extreme virtual desktop and application sessions.
With Session Recording, the administrator can choose to record local or remote sessions, to a central recording Server where the administrator can watch the recordings back via a HTML 5 web console integrated into the server.
The Session Recordings are stored as MP4 files for watching via the web console or downloading to play in a local player.
The VMware Horizon Session Recording Fling comprises of two components:
A Central Recording Repository + Web Front End
The Agent to be installed in the virtual desktop or RDSH host template which facilitates the recording.
Today VMware Horizon Session Recording supports Windows Server 2016 as the Central Server along with Windows 7, 10, Server 2012 and Server 2016 on the agent.
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DRS Dump Insight H5 Plugin
If you like the the older DRS Dump Insight fling you will like the DRS Dump Insight H5 Plugin even more. No need anymore for pulling the data yourself, with the Plugin it will be available directly.
The DRS Dump Insight H5 Plugin helps answer simple questions like
“Can I get all the recommendations made by DRS?”
“Why did DRS make a certain recommendation?”
“Why is DRS not making any recommendations to balance my cluster?”
“How is my custom affinity/anti-affinity rule affecting load balancing in my cluster?”
“If I have a policy defined in my cluster, how different would DRS load balancing be?”
When diagnosing Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) cluster issues in vSphere, we look at vCenter server logs from the support bundle, including DrmDump files to find any clues. Analyzing DrmDumps is a slow and tedious process, is usually done by VMware support or Engineering teams for advanced debugging of algorithm related issues. This is because analyzing the dumps requires building a replayer module, for which one needs access to the source code. Another challenge is that the final DrmDump data is not in plain text format; it requires someone with an understanding of the source code to be able to make good sense of it.
There is an existing DRS Dump Insight fling, which can replay DrmDumps and provide useful information for debugging. However, Dump Insight requires users to manually upload relevant DrmDump files from the time when the issue occurred. With the DRS Dump Insight H5 Plugin, customers do not need to upload any DrmDump files, and can access all the anal yzed information from their vSphere HTML5 web client itself.
Once a customer installs the HTML5 plugin, a new DRS Dump Insight tab will be available under the “cluster -> monitor” view.
All the DrmDump files that are available for the given cluster are listed in the opening screen. Customers can select the dump file of their choice for analysis.
They can also select multiple dump files to be analyzed together.
After analysis, the tool shows the analysis for each dump file in a separate tab view.
The Workspace ONE Configuration Tool helps you build special-purpose unattend.xml configuration files to be applied in the Dell factory as part of Factory Provisioning. This helps to domain join (domain, workgroup, AAD, AAD Premium) and enroll devices automatically on first-boot. This simplifies the creation of the unattend.xml configuration file for Windows 10.
Features
It’s a stand-alone .exe app that helps IT administrators configure general and Out-of-the-Box Experience Windows setups to automatically enroll users in Workspace ONE.
The User Interface is made simple with explicit instructions about each field for easy and quick use by IT admins.
The User Interface has dynamic and efficient validations in Clarity and Angular, preventing the user from building the unattend.xml until all the validations are correctly satisfied.
This makes the UI fool-proof and reduces the chances of generating an invalid xml file.
The tool is made as a .Net Core 2.0 web app with Angular 5 and Clarity, which eases the integration of v2.0 into the AirWatch Console.
Updated
[sta_anchor id=”esxicompcheck” /]
ESXi Compatibility Checker
With the ESXi Compatibility Checker a vSphere admin can automatically check and validate a current vSphere environment against the HCL.
Changelog
Build 10066133
Fixed bugs
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HCIBench
While it probably is optimized for VSAN workloads the HCIBench is a benchmark tool that can be used with any HCI solution.
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