Having recently joined Datrium, one of my first tasks is to begin to understand the product Datrium calls DVX. As a way of helping me wrap my head around this technology, I’ve decided to blog about it. I plan on starting at a high-level and then slowly digging deeper under the covers as I learn more.

If you are interested in following my posts, you can subscribe here and follow me on Twitter.

So to begin with, let’s start at the 100 level.

What is Datrium DVX? – 100 Level

Datrium DVX offers Disaggregated Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (DHCI) along with Cloud Mobility. Yep, lots of buzzwords there! So what does that actually mean? Let’s start with the basic question, “What is the Datrium DVX solution made up of?”

I’m pleased to announce that I’ll be speaking at not one, but two VMware User Group‘s (VMUG’s) in June/July. There will be lots of great speakers at both of these events which you really don’t want to miss out on. My session is titled: The Secret Sauce Behind VMware’s Internal VMware Horizon Desktop Deployment – In this session, I’ll be revealing how VMware deployed and run their own Horizon environments.

Make sure you register to guarantee your space and also keep an eye out for a couple of vBeers which we are planning on arranging in and around these events.

• Minneapolis VMUG (Tuesday, June 12th, 2018) – Agenda / Register here / vBeers
• Indianapolis VMUG (Tuesday, July 10th, 2018) – Agenda / Register here

If you are attending either of events please be sure to come and say hi!

I’m pleased to announce that I’ll be speaking at not one, but two VMware USer Group’s (VMUG’s) in April. I am very excited as these will technically be my first (and second) time speaking at a VMUG. I’ve run a VCDX Workshop before at the UK VMUG, but never had my own speaking session. There will be lots of great speakers at both of these events which you really don’t want to miss out on. My session is titled: The Secret Sauce Behind VMware’s Internal VMware Horizon Desktop Deployment – In this session, I’ll be revealing how VMware deployed and run their own Horizon environments.

Make sure you register to guarantee your space and also keep an eye out for a couple of vBeers which we are planning on arranging in and around these events.

• Central Ohio VMUG (Tuesday, April 3rd, 2018) – Agenda / Register here
• Wisconsin VMUG (Thursday, April 5th, 2018) – Agenda / Register here

If you are attending either of events please be sure to come and say hi!

I thought I would share some pretty exciting news with you guys, I’ve recently received an award internally within VMware for a cool project that myself and my colleague Aresh Sarkari have been working on for the past 6-8 months. The project in question is called OneDesk. I’ll explain more about OneDesk shortly.

CIO Innovation Award

The award we won is called the VMware CIO Innovation award. Here is the description of the Innovation category:

 The team which best accomplished the goal of creating and developing new products and/or services.

VMware & Dell Technologies CIO, Bask Iyer & Simon Long – CIO 2017 Innovation Award

Simon Long – VMware CIO 2017 Innovation Award

Luckily for me, our CIO, Bask Iyer was kind enough to present the award in person. It’s always a great feeling to get recognized for hard work. I’m very glad that other people within VMware also see the value of the project we’ve been working on.

OneDesk

The project myself and Aresh have been working on is called OneDesk. For those of you who attended our VMworld session: The Secret Sauce Behind VMware’s Internal Horizon Desktop Deployments you’d have heard us talking about it during our session. For those of you who were unfortunate enough to miss it, I’ll explain all about it now.

What is OneDesk?

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Just over 8 years ago, I was working hard to learn all I could about VMware’s vSphere technologies. A big part of this learning process included creating VCP Practice Exam that I could use to help me learn all of the different products and features that I needed to know to pass the VCP Exam. What was unexpected, was the popularity of the VCP Practice Exam that I had created and shared on this Blog. I even had official VMware trainers recommending my blog to their students looking to sit the VCP Exam. And still, to this day, I get customers & colleagues coming up to me and thanking me for the work I did on my blog as it really helped them improve their knowledge and eventually pass the VCP Exam.

After offering VCP Practice Exams for both vSphere 4 and vSphere 5, other priorities meant that I never got around to continuing on this trend with vSphere 5.5 and vSphere 6.

However, today, I am pleased to announce that my VCP6.5 DCV Practice Exams are now available to everyone. I’ve personally created 150+ mock exam questions based on the objectives documented in the VCP6.5 DCV Exam Guide.

As with all of my previous exams, all of the questions are created by me. Unfortunately, this might also mean that some of the answers maybe not be completely correct. Yes, I am human, I make mistakes. This exam is still in BETA, as such, some question/answers may be incorrect or misleading. Feel free to provide feedback via the Contact Me page.

These VCP6.5 practice exams are designed to engage the thought process. DO NOT waste your time trying to memorize these questions/answers as they will NOT appear in your VCP exam. Instead, if you are unsure of an answer, go and revise the feature/product. This will ensure you have a better overall understanding and should be able to cope better when being asked other questions around those products/features.

I’ve created two types of Exams:

• Section Exams, which only have questions specific to each section of the exam guide.
• A Full Mock Exam, which simulates the actual VCP Exam. You will be given a time limit of 105 minutes in which to answer 70 questions picked at random from all 10 sections.

Section Exams

• Section 1 – Configure and Administer vSphere 6.x Security [20 Questions]
• Section 2 – Configure and Administer vSphere 6.x Networking [26 Questions]
• Section 3 – Configure and Administer vSphere 6.x Storage [30 Questions]
• Section 4 – Upgrade a vSphere Deployment to 6.x [20 Questions]
• Section 5 – Administer and Manage vSphere 6.x Resources [18 Questions]
• Section 6 – Backup and Recover a vSphere Deployment [28 Questions]
• Section 7 – Troubleshoot a vSphere Deployment [4 Questions]
• Section 8 – Deploy and Customize ESXi Hosts [12 Questions]
• Section 9 – Configure and Administer vSphere and vCenter Availability Solutions [Coming Soon]
• Section 10 – Administer and Manage vSphere Virtual Machines [Coming Soon]

Full Mock Exam

Exam will contain 70 random questions from all categories with a time limit of 105 mins

Start Mock Exam

If you’re currently studying for your VCP6.5 DCV Exam, then you have come to the right place! I’ve personally created 158 mock exam questions based on the objectives documented in the VCP6.5 DCV Exam Guide.

I’ve created two types of Exams:

• Section Exams, which only have questions specific to each section of the exam guide.
• A Full Mock Exam, which simulates the actual VCP Exam. You will be given a time limit of 105 minutes in which to answer 70 questions picked at random from all 10 sections.

Section Exams

• Section 1 – Configure and Administer vSphere 6.x Security [20 Questions]
• Section 2 – Configure and Administer vSphere 6.x Networking [26 Questions]
• Section 3 – Configure and Administer vSphere 6.x Storage [30 Questions]
• Section 4 – Upgrade a vSphere Deployment to 6.x [20 Questions]
• Section 5 – Administer and Manage vSphere 6.x Resources [18 Questions]
• Section 6 – Backup and Recover a vSphere Deployment [28 Questions]
• Section 7 – Troubleshoot a vSphere Deployment [4 Questions]
• Section 8 – Deploy and Customize ESXi Hosts [12 Questions]
• Section 9 – Configure and Administer vSphere and vCenter Availability Solutions [Coming Soon]
• Section 10 – Administer and Manage vSphere Virtual Machines [Coming Soon]

Full Mock Exam

Exam will contain 70 random questions from all categories with a time limit of 105 mins

Start Mock Exam

This week VMware released a major update to Horizon (View).

• Horizon 7.1 Release Notes
• VMware Horizon 7.1 Is GA! What’s New – Part 1
• VMware Horizon 7.1 Is GA! What’s New – Part 2
• Horizon 7.1 Download Page

I’ve been using Horizon 7.1 for a few weeks and I wanted to share my Top 3 features with you. They are in no particular order.

1. VMware Horizon Virtualization Pack for Skype for Business (Beta)

This is something I’ve been waiting for, for a long time. With the Horizon Desktop I use internally in VMware, this is the only thing that has been stopping me from going ‘all in’ 100% VDI. Until now, I’ve been making my Skype for Business calls via the client which is installed on my laptop. Now I can finally move everything inside the virtual desktop, including my voice and video calls.

Making Audio/Video calls in a virtual desktop has a long history of pain which goes back to my early days here at VMware. If you were to install the Skype For Business client into a virtual desktop environment and use it as if it was installed on your local PC/Laptop, you encounter an issue which we term ‘Media hairpinning’. What happens here is, all of your Audio/Video traffic gets streamed via the virtual desktop infrastructure, rather than going point-to-point or ‘end user’ to ‘end user’. For example, we might have two users on the West coast of the US. Their Horizon environment is located on the East coast. When they Skype called each other, User A’s  Audio/Video would travel from their end point on the West coast, to their virtual desktop on the East coast, to User B’s virtual desktop on the East coast and then to User B’s end point on the West coast. (See below)

The distance that the traffic has to travel can cause Audio/Video performance to be really poor. What we ideally want is for the Audio/Voice traffic to got direct, from User A to User B, point-to-point.

And this is essentially what the VMware Horizon Virtualization Pack for Skype for Business does for us.

As mentioned above, this feature is currently in Beta. Do not let that deter you, I’ve been using it for a little while and it seems to be functioning really well. When testing it with my colleagues, they are unable to tell if I am calling from my laptop or within my Horizon desktop. From the end user perspective, there are a few things that I’ve noticed which have slightly different behavior from the native client. For example, my mute button on my headphone lead no longer mutes me in the client and when someone is talking in a group chat the little window which usually shows the profile photo of who is talking doesn’t seem to update. Honestly, this isn’t a problem for me.

If you use Skype For Business within your company, I highly recommend that you test it out even whilst it is in Beta. The requirements are very basic and configuration is very straight forward unlike the old LyncVDI Plugin.

You can read more about it here: https://blogs.vmware.com/euc/2017/03/vmware-horizon-virtualization-pack-skype-for-business-beta.html and download the software and documentation here: https://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/beta/horizon-skype4business-beta/overview

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Whilst working on my Horizon View API page, trying to figure out which API calls return the data that you can see in the Horizon Administrator Console, it soon became clear that the API Query Service is used to collect a lot of the data seen within the UI. The way I managed to figure this was by analyzing a Horizon View Example Desktop Script created by Alan Renouf. So I’m going to try and document how to use the Query Service here so that other can use begin to use this really powerful tool.

Hopefully, this will be useful to you. If you have any questions, please either comment below or contact me directly. I will update this page as I learn more.

• There are few commands that we need to execute to enable the query service, I believe that these three commands will remain the same regardless of what query you are trying to run.

C:\> $ViewAPI = $global:DefaultHVServers[0].ExtensionData
C:\> $query_service = New-Object "Vmware.Hv.QueryServiceService"
C:\> $query = New-Object "Vmware.Hv.QueryDefinition"

• The next command needs to be modified depending on the data you are trying to capture. You can define the ‘queryEntityType‘ with any of the Queryable Data Objects.

C:\> $query.queryEntityType = 'DesktopSummaryView'

• Once the Data Object has been defined we can now run the following command. The variable name $Pool can be changed to reflect the data you are collecting.

C:\> $Pools = $query_service.QueryService_Query($ViewAPI,$query)

• Now we have the Variable defined we can start to find the data we need. In this example, I am looking to get a list Pools. Do get this information I can run the following:

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This week VMware released some EUC focused product updates that I think you will be interested in. I’ve gone through and picked my top 3 features for each release. All three product updates should now be available via the VMware Downloads portal.

Horizon 7.0.3

My top 3 release highlights:

1. Horizon PowerCLI – Now you can use PowerCLI to pretty much do anything you can via Horizon Administrator. (Getting started with PowerCLI 6.5 and Horizon View)
2. Support for Horizon and vCenter 6.5 HA
3. Additional Windows 10 support

Release Notes: http://pubs.vmware.com/Release_Notes/en/horizon-7-view/horizon-703-view-release-notes.html
Release Blog Post: http://blogs.vmware.com/euc/2016/12/horizon-7-0-3-horizon-client-4-3-windows-10-management.html

Horizon Client 4.3

My top 3 release highlights:

1. 30% Blast Extreme bandwidth reductions ‘out of the box’ – Similar to the optimizations VMware made to the default PCoIP configuration a few years ago, we have optimized the Blast Extreme protocol for the masses. However, you are still free to change the GPO settings should you so wish.
2. Blast Extreme (H.264 decoding) with Multi-Monitor support
3. The ability to select which monitor on which to display your virtual desktop session

Release Notes: http://pubs.vmware.com/Release_Notes/en/horizon-client/horizon-client-windows-43-release-notes.html

App Volumes 2.12

My top 3 release highlights:

1. Improved Active Directory Integration – You can now add multiple AD domain controllers into App Volumes Manager. This is something I’ve been pushing for internally. If you don’t use load-balancers in your environment, you were only able to add in a single Domain controller which became a SPOF.
2. Improved login & application launch performance – 30% to 50% decrease in login times.
3. Office 365 (Office 2016) support through AppStacks

Release Notes: http://pubs.vmware.com/Release_Notes/en/appvolumes/2.12/app-volumes-212-release-notes.html
Release Blog Post: http://blogs.vmware.com/euc/2016/12/introducing-app-volumes-2-12.html

Continuing on from yesterday’s post: Common VCDX Mistakes: R01: Customer Requires N+1 I have another common VCDX mistake for you.

A02: Enough bandwidth between Datacenters

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