Remove/Recompose/Refresh a desktop vm from PowerCLI script

June 19, 2013, 7:31 am

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Hi,

we want to automate a part our View infrastructure to delete a VM when it is not longer needed in a dedicated pool.

PowerCLI has no commandlet to do this within a script.

I tried to delete a VM with sviconfig to get rid of the composer DB entries and the virtual machine in our vCenter, the LDAP entries are easy to be removed on the connections servers.

But is sviconfig a clean way to delete a vm? I mean does it realy delete all the files from the datastores, or does it just delete the entries in its vCenter database?

If it does not remove all files used by the vm, I could find them before I delete it using vCO or other nice scripts.

 

Hmm, PowerCLI is mighty but cannot do such easy things .

 

Would be great if you have an idea or comment

 

thanks in advance

 

Manuel

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View 5.0 to 5.2 - Upgrade or Start Fresh?

June 19, 2013, 7:52 am

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I've had numerous, inconsistent issues with VMware View 5 since the get go.  Issues mainly dealing with View Composer actions that fail (can't delete VMs, can't modify pool settings, etc.) that VMware has escalated to their engineering department and have not provided any solutions.  I've given up resolving the issue.  In a desperate attempt to stabilize our environment, I'm going to try View 5.2.  I've read the upgrade documentation and it sounds fine but since I already have a slew of problems (I think it's with the View Composer DB), I want to know if it's possible to just start fresh? 

 

Can View 5.0 and 5.2 coexist in the same AD domain?

 

What do I need to be wary of by going this route?  I'm pretty sure there's no way to carry a pool over from one deployment to another so I'll just have to spin up new ones.  Problem is I use persistent disks (which probably account for 75% my View woes), so how do I get them reconnected to the new enviro?  I have to reuse the EMC SAN so the files will be accessible, I'm just suspicious that View won't accept an older version persistent disk.  Anyone have any ideas?  If anyone has opted to start "fresh", rather than upgrade, please let me know your process and outcome.

 

I'm on ESXi 5.0 623860.  All View is running 5.0.0-481677.  I have a dual Security/Connection server setup.

 

Thanks so much!

Kyle

Re: Simple way to test end to end pcoip connectivity

June 19, 2013, 7:52 am

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Hi,

maybe this artilce could help you to troubleshoot your PCoIP network.

How to monitor PCoIP performance in View 5 with WMI counters - VirtualizeTips | VirtualizeTips

 

Manuel

Issues After Upgrade

June 19, 2013, 9:17 am

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Not exactly sure what went wrong but I recently upgraded my VM environment from ESXi 5.0 - 5.1.1 along with vcenter.  Now I'm getting an error in View "Cannot connect to vcenter server because the username and password are invalid.  It's the same username and password as it's always been.  Is this related to the SSO install since the 5.1 upfrade??  When I look at my pools I cannot edit any of them at all.  I cannot create a new one at all.  When ilook at my vcenter server under view configuration it shows my vcenter server.  If I try to add a new server it just shows the same.  I tried to install it again and it let me but now all the older pools are related to the old vcenter server.  How can I get those old pools to a point where I can edit them???  I don't have to delete them do I?  any help is appreciated.  Sorry for all the babbling.

 

Perry

Re: Horizon View 5.2: migrate vCenter to another computer, dedicated pools only

June 19, 2013, 10:45 am

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Yes, I did not miss that fact. But you should be able to skip the steps that involves View Composer and still migrate.

It should be much easier to do then with linked clones...

 

I would also recommend to do it in a test environment and document the steps.

 

// Linjo

Re: VMware View Agent 5.2.0 PCoIP over WAN fails

June 19, 2013, 11:01 am

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Jason,

 

I am also having trouble with PCoIP 5.2 traffic.  We use Palo Alto as well.  I see that you were able to get it working.  Could you provide a little more detail about how you got it to work?  I see that you created a rule for category and URL but how did you create that?

 

Thanks,

 

Ken

ThinClient Tracking

June 19, 2013, 11:15 am

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Question:  I would like to track what ThinClient is being used to log into View in order to track problematic machines.

 

I have ThinClient1 that user BOB uses to log into the View Client and access VDIPOOL1 Desktops.  If BOB moves to ThinClient46 to log into the View Client, I'd like to be able to audit/report this type of movement. ThinClient OS is Windows Embedded Standard 7 (ThinPC).

Currently, the View Event logs in the database track Username and which VDI Desktop the user accesses, when they logged in, when they disconnect, when they fail to authentication, etc, etc, but nothing about the machine they authenticated from.

 

How are others doing this?  I'd like to avoid a login script that pulls this information from the HKCU\Volatile Environment Registry Key.

Re: Manual View Assignments

June 19, 2013, 11:29 am

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I had that error myself, but I have always been a 1:1 dedicated environment.  I have had no further issues since moving to 5.2.

 

How I set mine up:  You are assigning a specific pool to a specific vm, so it is a Manual Pool with a Floating assignment.

Using a Dedicated assignment, View will try to assign the dedicated vm, but if it can't find it, it'll grab one from the pool.

I had to create a separate pool for each vm.  A gigantic PITA, but it is working. 

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Event Logs vs. Syslogs

June 19, 2013, 11:44 am

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Under Event Configuration, there is a spot to setup an event database and a spot to setup syslogging.

What is the difference?

 

I am thinking that having the syslog server setup would be better?

Re: how to find the list of ideal vms

June 19, 2013, 11:55 am

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Are you trying to find idle times?

Powercli script to analyze the idle VM's

Re: VMware View Agent 5.2.0 PCoIP over WAN fails

June 19, 2013, 1:36 pm

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The root cause of our problem was the fact that the consolidation of our ASAs into a single physical platform resulted in there being "trusted internal" addresses appearing on our "untrusted external" ports on Palo Alto. Previous versions of the VMware View Agent were not encrypting all packets, so Palo Alto could recognize the PCoIP application, which made correlations easy. However, the new VMware View Agent v5.2 has more encrypted content, so the amount of searchable information that Palo Alto can access is limited. We ended up creating a new Palo Alto policy to specifically allow SSL traffic from our two VMware View Security Servers.

Re: USB redirection not working

June 19, 2013, 8:22 pm

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Thanks for your providing info and screenshots.

 

I also found similar issue on Fusion http://communities.vmware.com/thread/187469?start=0&tstart=0 , so I think the reason may be caused by the USB device has multiple interfaces (Storage, Keyboard/Mouse/HID) and Keyboard/Mouse/HID are blocked by default for View Client. Please try below workaround, I'm not sure whether this workaround works for you since I don't have this device on my hand.

 

Steps of workaround:

1. Open Terminal.app

2. Execute command as root "sudo defaults write com.vmware.viewusb AllowKeyboardMouse 1"

3. Execute command as root "sudo defaults write com.vmware.viewusb AllowHID 1"

4. Execute command as root "sudo defaults write com.vmware.viewusb DisableRemoteConfig 1"

5. Quit View Client and relaunch it

6. Login to server and connect to desktop

7. Enable "Automatically connect when inserted" in USB menu

7. Plug in the device

 

Thanks,

 

Brian Yu

Assign multiple users to one linked clone?

June 19, 2013, 8:50 pm

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Hello, I recently created a media pool for my manufacturing departments.  I set it up as a dedicated pull with an 8 gig persistent disk to support the users desktop and lotus notes information.  However, I have three shifts running in this department.  My current setup only assigns one user per virtual desktop.  In this setup if I replace a computer that has three users on it (one per shift) with a zero client using View, I will have to have three clones from the media pool to replace this one machine.  It really seems like I am wasting resources here.  Is there any way to configure this so that I can have at leat three users assigned to one clone?  I know I could do a floating pool, but I have to be able to keep my users desktops as well as their notes data folder. 

PCOIP.ADM settings only applied to WAN users

June 20, 2013, 12:08 am

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Case:

I have a pool of desktops that will be accessed via LAN and WAN. I want only for the WAN that specified settings from the PCOIP.ADM are applied. What's the best way to dot this using 1 pool.

Re: problem with mcafee DLP Device control on virtual machines winxp

June 20, 2013, 12:41 am

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Hallo,

 

so we found the Problem.

The reason why in the virtual machine there is no SN of the stick we could not solve but for this we are in contact with zeroclient vendor teradici.

The reason why the instance id of the stick and the PID or VID where not working was a problem in the permission set for the users who applied the policy to EPO.

The DLP Policy showed that it applyed the rules and also show it later when you loggon but it was just on the configuration screen that this rules are configuried when you use in DLP POLICY the Import configuration from EPO server than it loads the config which is realy in use and so we saw that when we configured the USB Stick via VID PID or device instance it was never written to the EPO Server and never applied to the virtual machine :-)

 

best regards maybe this is helpful for somebody

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Re: Assign multiple users to one linked clone?

June 20, 2013, 4:04 am

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You could use a floating pool with View persona to retain user information or maybe some type of generic login for the dedicated machine that would allow the three shift works to share.   You could disable SSO on the desktop, that way the generic login would only bring you to the View desktop and then they coult authenticate to windows with their domain username/password.

Re: USB redirection not working

June 20, 2013, 6:23 am

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Didn't work, those steps produced the same results.

View Users default printer not always sticking

June 20, 2013, 6:44 am

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We are using VMWare Horizon View 5.2 and it seems that about 50% of the time, our users' default printer is not remember between sessions. I put a ticket in with VMWare, who referred me to the KB telling us to use their Location Based printing service, or uninstall ThinPrint. Location Based Printing is not really an option. I've disabled the ThinPrint services in our master image, then recomposed, but that didn't seem to help. Anybody out there figure out a fix?

Re: PCOIP.ADM settings only applied to WAN users

June 20, 2013, 6:58 am

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I don't believe you can do this without having 2 pools and then setup internal/external tags.

View persona roaming not always working

June 20, 2013, 8:15 am

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Hey guys,

I have a problem with one of my view pools. It's a floating pool with persona managemt. I configured the .adm on the domain controller OU as follows:

• manage user persona - enabled
• Persona repository location - enabled and path configured
• Remove local persona at logoff - disabled
• Roam local settings folder - enabled

The rest is not configured. I also enabled the "waiting for network" rule in the active directory. But now the problem: For some reason there is the problem that parts of the user persona (like the desktop) or sometimes the whole user persona is not on the users desktop or somewhere else after reboot. When I reboot the machine a second time, sometimes the whole user data is back again, sometimes not...

Ask me if you need further information!

 

Regards

Robert