I've been working with Mirage quite a bit over the past few months and I wanted to share a little tweak that can help speed up Centralization and other network intensive processes.

Disclaimer: As stated in the title of this post, this is great for Test environments. I wouldn't however recommend you configure this on your production environment unless you fully understand the impact of the changes. 

Disabling Bandwidth Throttling

By default Mirage enables bandwidth throttling. This can reduce the through-put between your desktops and your Mirage Servers to ensure you don't saturate you WAN connections. However during Testing there is a good chance that all of your desktops are on the same LAN as the Mirage Servers. In which case you may not care if you use all of the bandwidth available, especially if it is going to mean less waiting around.

To disable bandwidth throttling, the following steps need to be made on all desktops.

1. Open Notepad using "Run as Administrator"
2. Browse to the following file: C:\Program Files\Wanova\Mirage Service\Wanova.Desktop.Service.exe.config
3. Find the following entry: <add key="throttleEnabled" value="true">
4. Change value="true" to value="false"
5. Save the config file
6. Restart the Wanova Mirage Desktop Service in the services mmc.

You should now notice an increase in performance.

This isn't my usual type of post, but I thought it might be something that could come in handy for a lot of people so I've decided to share it with you.

I'm a big big fan of SONOS, I currently have two PLAY:3's and I'm sure that will increase over time. I am also a Premium Spotify user which is great as SONOS and Spotfy work really well together and I'm able to access all my Spotify playlist via the SONOS Controllers. However, there is one area where Spotify lets me down and that is Podcasts. I'm a big Podcast fan, I like to listen to them through-out the day in my home office whilst I am working. Up until now, I've been manually downloading the Podcast MP3's onto a NAS device and linking the file share with SONOS to be able to play them. It's a little too much manual effort for my liking. So I started to look into ways to make my life easier.

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The first ever Yorkshire VMUG is taking place next week!! This is a great opportunity to come together with your fellow VMware users to discuss virtualization trends, best practices, and the latest technology. 

Session Highlights

• Server Virtualization Solutions and Roadmap- Raj Mistry, HP
• VMware 5.1 Whats New- Dan Watson, VMware
• Building my Home Lab- Andrew McMorris, Communisis
• Join us for vbeers at the Victory Bar

If this is something you are interested in make sure you register beforehand. Register Here

You can also follow the official Yorkshire VMUG twitter account.

VMware currently have A LOT of open positions that are focus around VMware's End User Computing technologies. There are both pre and post sales roles going around the world. 

The following link is a search of all of the open positions that are EUC focused. http://jobs.vmware.com

If you can see a role that you are interested in, drop me a email via my Contact Me page and I'll make sure your resume/CV gets to the right people. 

VMware View Client version 1.6 and above can be launched by using a URI . So for example if you click the following URI the VMware View Client can be launched automatically logging you into your View desktop. vmware-view://view.mycompany.com/Primary%20Desktop?action=start-session

More information on the VMware View URI Scheme can be found in my previous post: VMware View URI Scheme

One thing that I had noticed was that the application launching wasn't working when using Google Chrome both on my Mac and on Windows whereas Firefox, IE and Safari worked fine. Being able to launch the View Client from Google Chrome is something that I will be using more and more in the future, so I decided I would try and figure out how I can get this to work. 

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VMware View Client version 1.6 and above can be launched by using a URI  Hyperlink. So for example if you click the following URI the VMware View Client can be launched automatically logging you in to your View desktop. vmware-view://view.mycompany.com/Primary%20Desktop?action=start-session

Note: All the information in this post can be found in the following document: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/view-client-mac-document.pdf

VMware View Client URI Scheme

This is the URI syntax for the VMware View client: vmware-view://[authority-part][/path-part][?query-part]

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In an earlier post I mentioned that vSphere 5.1 is not compatible with any versions of VMware View. Well I am please to you inform you all that today VMware have released an express patch for ESXi (ESXi510-201210001) which fixes an issue that caused the incompatibility issue. 

The official VMware KB with details on how to get this latest patch can be found here: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2035268

For those of you who follow me on twitter you may well have seen me tweeting about the View 3D Experience over the duration of both of this years VMworlds.

Myself and a colleague Tim Federwitz (virtuallygeeky.com) had been tasked to showcase VMware's vSGA (Virtual Shared Graphics Acceleration) that will be released in the next release of VMware View at some point in H1 2013.

What is vSGA?

Before I go into what we had running at VMworld, I'll just go into a little more detail about vSGA (Virtual Shared Graphics Acceleration).

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Around 1am this morning I awoke from a dream where I was repeatedly refreshing my email in the hope I would get my VCDX defense results. Before returning to sleep I decided to check my phone, and there it was. My result was in. Blurry eyed I open the attached PDF to see the magical words:

Your VCDX number is 105

I've passed! It's over! After working towards this goal for the last 4 years, I have finally made it. Time to relax. 

My VCDX Experience 

Overall, despite the many many hours I spent working on my design to make sure it was as solid as possible, I enjoyed the process. I learnt the most from just being extremely careful on EVERY design decision I made. I knew, if I made a mistake on anything I would be picked up on it, so I spent many days going through everything to make sure it was accurate and I could back up the reasons for making those design decisions. This has undoubtedly helped me as a consultant.

As for the defense itself, for some reason I wasn't actually nervous, no dry mouth, no shaky hands. I think this was because I knew my design was good, I was confident in what I had designed.

Filled with confidence and a clear mind, I tired to answer and explain everything that was asked and if there was something I really didn't know, I was honest and held my hands up. You can't trick these guys, so don't bother trying. The whole experience was over in a flash. The wait for the results was the opposite.

My VCDX Tips

Defense – Spend time making sure everything you have chosen in your design is accurate and you fully understand the reason you chose it and the reasons why you didn't chose the other options.

Design – Read the scenario thoroughly. Understand it. If something isn't clear, ask the panel. Talk them through everything you are thinking with regards to how your design might look. If you don't talk, they don't know that you aren't just making something up.

Troubleshoot – Don't worry too much about finding the issue. Make sure you troubleshoot methodically. If you need the "customer" to do/test something, tell them why you are asking them to do it, so they understand your train of thought. And DON'T PANIC if at first you don't know what the issue might be.

Hello people, I've just noticed that I have neglected my "Recommended Blogs" section for far to long.

So if you have a Virtualization focused Blog, you are not already on my list and would like appear on my recommended blogs section please use my Contact page to email me your url and I will review you blog. If I feel it is appropriate, I will add it to my list. Could you also include your RSS feed URL so I can add you to my personal RSS Feed Reader and keep up with all of your great articles.

Thanks guys