VMworld 2013 San Francisco is now less than two weeks away!! But there is still plenty of time to make sure you schedule in all of your “must see” sessions. To help with the scheduling, VMware has just release their VMworld 2013 app for both iOS and Android. This is a cool app that you can use to create your own schedule, or access a schedule you’ve create via the vmworld.com website. I all also have many other features such as a Venue Map, Hands on Lab information, details of all of the sponsors/exhibitors and much more.

Here is a list of my session, a couple of which are being repeated.

Demystifying VMware Mirage: Tips and Tricks for Success (EUC4815)

Wondering what Mirage really does, how it works, and how to successfully design and implement Mirage for your company or organization? VMware’s Global Professional Services team will present a technical walk-though of a real-world end-to-end design & implementation of VMware Mirage. Hear first-hand how VMware Architects address technical and operational challenges, such as server and storage sizing, networking, and other critical VMware Mirage design elements. The team will show real-world architecture examples and share their lessons learned and best practices enabling you to be successful in deploying VMware Mirage.

Session Times

• Wednesday 16:00
  
• Thursday 12:30 (Repeat)

PCoIP: Sizing For Success (EUC5249)

Baffled by the PCoIP sizing minefield that accompanies an Horizon View deployment? No idea where to start? Join Chuck and Simon as they give an introduction to PCoIP, helping you understand important characteristics of the protocol that need to be considered when sizing for PCoIP. The session will then guide you through the critical steps required to optimize, measure and calculate PCoIP bandwidth requirements tailored to your environment.

Session Times

• Wednesday 10:00
• Thursday 14:00 (Repeat)

EUC Experts Panel – Successful Implementations (EUC6045)

Performance issues with virtual desktops? Experiencing issues with virtualized apps? Unsure how to scale your virtual desktop environment? What about Horizon Workspace and Mirage? Where do they fit into your desktop strategy? Come meet EUC Architects from Global Services Engineering as they answer your questions and explain their experience with designing and implementing some of the largest and most complex EUC environments to date. This helps customers realize the full potential of their EUC investment and is responsible for solving some of the thorniest problems and toughest design challenges. The panel includes experts in all of the Horizon Suite products, as well as critical infrastructure support elements for EUC such as Active Directory and anti-virus, storage solutions, networking, load balancing and many others. Come and ask the experts for help with some of the challenges you are facing and let them share their field experience and lessons learned to help you in all your EUC endeavors.

Session Times

• Tuesday 16:00

VMworld San Francisco is almost here again folks and it’s time for another vBeers Tweetup!  The last vBeers Tweetup from VMworld SF 2012 was a great time so we couldn’t let this opportunity go by without arranging another one.  The official vBeers tweetup goes from strength to strength and increases in popularity every year that passes, though still has the same great earthy community feel that it did during it’s first one back in 2009.

The VMworld San Francisco vBeers Tweetup will be held on Saturday 24th August, kicking off from 6:00pm.

The vBeers Tweetup is intended as a way to relax, chill-out and catch up with friends, new and old.  If you don’t know anyone attending then that doesn’t matter as your fellow vGeeks are a friendly welcoming bunch who also like to network, talk tech and share vStories.

In true Tweetup tradition this vBeers Tweetup is not sponsored, it is a case of turning up, enjoying yourself and covering the cost of your own drinks and any food.  Vendor sponsored parties start the following day (Sunday).

We’ll also be bringing along some vBeers coasters/beer-mats along with limited edition vBeers stickers.

Like vBeers on Facebook

Join the vBeers Community on Google Plus

Where is this VMworld San Francisco 2013 vBeers Tweetup going to be held?

The venue for this VMworld vBeers Tweetup is back for a third time at “The Chieftain” Irish pub and restaurant, which has a great relaxed informal atmosphere with good food and drink.  Good news as they have free Wi-Fi, which will save all of you from overseas from clocking-up massive data bills on your Smart Phones.

As for registering, no need – all you need to do is turn up, though if you’d like to RSVP to give me an idea of numbers please click here.  First come, first served with seating. However most people tend to stand as it make it easier to mingle.

Hope to see you there!

The Details
Venue: The Chieftain
Address: 198 5th Street @ Howard, San Francisco, CA 94103
Date: Saturday 24th August 2013
Time: 6:00PM
Twitter Hashtag:  #vBeers
Map:  Click the map below for more map details

I just wanted to bring this to peoples attention.

Registration Now Open: Northwest England VMUG Meeting
Join us for the next Northwest England VMUG meeting taking place on Wednesday, 17th July 2013.
Registration is now open and available to all VMUG members. This is a great opportunity to meet with your peers to discuss virtualization trends, best practices, and the latest technology!

Meeting Agenda

•  13:00 Welcome to VMUG
• 13:15 What’s Next, What Do I Need to Start Skilling Up On? – Joe Baguley Chief Cloud Technologist EMEA
• 14:15 Veeam Backup and Replication
• 15:00 Refreshment Break
• 15:15 Evolution Recruitment Solutions: Our VDI Journey – Simon Watts
• 16:00 Veeam Storage Snapshot Efficiency
• 16:45 vNews – Ashley Davies, VMware SE
• 17:00 Raffle and Meeting Close
• 17:05 vBeers Tiger Tiger (Printworks)

Looks like another great agenda and some great speakers. You can follow the official NW England VMUG Twitter profile for the latest VMUG news.

Great news PCoIP users, Chuck Hirstius (@rexremus) has finally got around to updating his invaluable PCoIP Log Viewer to support Horizon View 5.2 PCoIP log files. The PCoIP Log Viewer is extremely useful when working with Horizon View environments that are using PCoIP. Whether you are trying to troubleshoot a PCoIP issue or trying to workout PCoIP bandwidth consumption.

For those of you who haven’t use the tool before, I’d recommend checking out my PCoIP Troubleshooting section.

Changes

• Now supports VMware Horizon View 5.2 PCoIP log files
• The Parser Command-line utility has been integrated into the Viewer. So no need to Parse the logs into XML first.

NOTE: The new version of the PCoIP Log Viewer will only parse Horizon View 5.2 PCoIP log directly in the Viewer. For PCoIP logs from older versions of Horizon View, you’ll still need the Parser.

Although there isn’t a lot of changes on the front end, Chuck has made some substantial changes on the back-end of this tool. You can read more about the changes he has made in his latest post: PCoIP Log Viewer Updated for View 5.2

Downloads

If you already have the PCoIPLogViewer.jnlp Webstart you will automatically get updated to the latest version.

If you do have it, you can download it from the mindfluxinc.net website.

I just heard that this document was released and just wanted to bring it to your attention. VMware Horizon View 5 Solutions Guide

This solution guide outlines VMware View 5 on NetApp storage. The guide covers pool design, cloning choices, and guest optimization, as well as end-user data layout. New technologies that are available in View 5.1, such as View Storage Accelerator, are also covered. This solution guide explains the different design choices and why each choice affects the outcome of the virtual desktop deployment.

So if you're are working on a Horizon View project using Netapp storage, I'd highly recommend you read this first to make sure you are following all of the recommended guidelines

The document is available for download here: http://www.netapp.com/us/media/tr-4181.pdf

For those of you who are involved in the architecture of Horizon View environments, I'm sure you this is a question you've always asked, but may have only ever got the response of "VMware doesn't support that design". Why doesn't VMware support this design? It works….most of the time?

During my time at VMware I've heard many different reasons as to why VMware does not support this design. Finally I have an accurate reason and wanted to share it with you.

What is a stretched VMware Horizon View cluster?

For those of who are asking yourselves, "What is a stretched VMware Horizon View cluster?", I'll set the scene a little. A stretched Horizon View cluster is when a single View Pod (cluster of View Connection Severs), spans more than one physical location connected by WAN / MAN / MLAN and NOT by a LAN.

An example of a stretched Horizon View Cluster:

After an internal discussion around this subject, a colleague and good friend of mine Mike Barnett, who used to be an Escalation Engineer in VMware's GSS (Global Support Services) set the record straight for us. 

So I've decide to adapt his explanation and share it with you.  Read the rest of this entry »

Over the past few week or so VMware has release some really useful technical white papers focused around VMware Horizon View. I just wanted to bring these to your attention in case you messed the announcements.

• Virtual Machine Graphics Acceleration Deployment Guide
• VMware Horizon View 5.2 Performance & Best Practices
• A Performance Deep Dive on Hardware Accelerated 3D Graphics
• VMware Horizon View Optimization Guide for Windows 7 and Windows 8

If you have an Horizon View environment, I would highly recommend you give these papers a read to ensure you are following all of the VMware's latest "Best Practices" that are appropriate for your environment.

Today my first official technical white paper got released on VMware.com – titled, Virtual Machine Graphics Acceleration Deployment Guide. It's been a long time coming. It was one of those papers where I could keep adding and adding to it.

The paper talks about the following topics:

• Why 3D Matters for VMware Horizon View
• Understanding the Differences Between Soft 3D/SVGA, vDGA and vSGA
• Prerequisites
• Application Requirements and Use Cases
• vSGA Installation
• vDGA Installation (Tech Preview)
• VMware Horizon View Pool Configuration for vSGA
• Performance Tuning Tips
• Resource Monitoring
• Troubleshooting

Hopefully it should cover everything you need to enable your Horizon View desktops for 3D rendering.

There are a number of other VMware Horizon View: New Technical White Papers that have been released recently that are well worth a read. Check.Them.Out

Something I get asked regularly is, "How Can I Run Multiple VMware Horizon View Clients At Once?", so I thought I'd just put a quick post out in the hope that in the future people will come across this post before having to ask. Quite often users would like to have multiple View sessions open at once on the screen or across screens. By default the Horizon View client only allows you to see a single View session at any one time. You can swap between multiple sessions, but you will still only be able to see a single session at any one time. This is how you can run multiple VMware Horizon View clients at once.  Read the rest of this entry »

A few weeks ago my RSS feeds were inundated with posts about vOpenData. I had decided to wait until the hype had died down a bit until I created a little reminder post to help keep the momentum going.

What is vOpenData?

vOpenData is an open community project that grew from the question "What is the average VMDK size for deployed virtual machines?" We wanted to create an open community database that is purely driven by users submitting their virtual infrastructure configurations. Leveraging the powerful virtualization community and applying simple analytics we are able to provide various trending statistics and data for virtualized environments. This is 100% community driven and the results will be available for everyone to view and hopefully you will contribute to the overall dataset!

Personally I think this is a great idea. The more people that anonymously share their stats, the better and more granular results will become available to us. 

Below you can see some of the data that is available via the vOpenData website.

Read the rest of this entry »