VMware Horizon 7 v 7.6 Technical What's New Overview

VMware End-User Computing (EUC) solutions empower the digital workspace by simplifying app & access management, unifying endpoint management & transforming Windows delivery. To learn more visit Digital Workspace Tech Zone at https://techzone.vmware.com

Introducing Frame to the Nutanix Family

Nutanix is thrilled to welcome Frame and its employees to the company. Hear from Sunil Potti (Chief Product and Development Officer, Nutanix); Greg Smith (Vice President, Product Marketing, Nutanix) and Rajiv Mirani (CTO, Cloud Platforms, Nutanix) about what makes Frame and Nutanix a perfect match and how Nutanix plans to incorporate Frame into the Nutanix product suite to further its commitment to customer choice and flexibility.

Nutanix Beam Demo's

Cost Visibility and Optimization

Nutanix Beam provides businesses with deep visibility into their multi-cloud environment and ability to optimize cloud spend with one-click. Beam identifies underutilized and unused cloud services and provides convenient single click remediation suggestions, empowering cloud operators to realize cost savings immediately.

Intelligent Consumption Planning

Nutanix Beam uses machine intelligence and recommendation algorithms to analyze workload patterns and continuously suggest optimal purchasing decisions. Beam simplifies the planning process for purchasing cloud resources to drive higher cost savings.

Central Financial Governance

Nutanix Beam provides cloud operators and business owners with appropriate tools and controls to track overall cloud spend and map consumption to business units easily. Beam provides policy-based reporting and chargeback, so that teams can ensure consumption is within budget and aligns with business objectives.

Security Compliance Checks

Beam automates cloud health checks so you can easily monitor and ensure security compliance. You can gain insights into your multi-cloud environment based on 250+ health checks and security best practices to ensure continuous cloud security compliance.

LSI Logic SAS vs VMware Paravirtual SCSI disk

Within virtual machines, there are different SCSI controllers available for writing the data to the actual disk. For the different operating systems, there are best practices which gives the best performance. Windows XP uses the BusLogic Parallel SCSI driver and the results are acceptable. With Windows 7 the commonly used controller is the LSI Logic SAS controller. Which is selected automatically when creating a virtual machine of this type.

Different vendors have different best practices, some of them advice to use the VMware Paravirtual SCSI controller. The VMware Paravirtual SCSI controller needs to be selected manually and needs some additional actions before it can be used. Creating a small additional disk with VMware

Paravirtual SCSI controller connected will force the OS the use and installation of the correct driver. The additional drive can be removed after installation and the initial drive must be connected to the VMware Paravirtual SCSI controller.

The question is which of these controllers gives the highest performance. For that I have started some tests with IOmeter in a virtual Windows 7 machine. The first test was with the VMware Paravirtual SCSI controller and using an additional disk beside the system disk. The results of the test is show below:



The second test was performed with the LSI Logic SAS controller and was using the additional diks.
This configuration could not give the same performance as the VMware Paravirtual SCSI controller, the results of this test are placed below



The other test we did was with the system disk instead of the additional disk. The same results are showed as the previous tests. The use of the VMware Paravirtual SCSI controller performs a little better then the LSI Logic SAS SCSI controller.

The results of above are within the virtual machine, with Xangati i was able to measure from the outside. The following picture will show the light better performance of the VMware Paravirtual SCSI controller, where the first and last test includes the VMware Paravirtual SCSI driver:


For now, the conclusion can be drawn that the use of the VMware Paravirtual SCSI controller lead them a slight performance gain in these test.

VMware Remote Console 7.0 Released

VMware Remote Console (VMRC) is a standalone Windows application that provides console access and client device connection to virtual machines on a remote host.  You need to download this installer before you can launch the external application directly from a vSphere Web Client.
In the VMware Remote Console Windows application, you will have access to:

• Mouse and keyboard functionality in the VM
• Send Ctrl + Alt + Delete
• Full screen mode
• VM power operations
• Client-side device connection such as CD-ROM, USB, and Floppy (requires administrator access)

Internationalization

VMware Remote Console 7.0 is available in the following languages:

• English
• French
• German
• Japanese
• Korean
• Simplified Chinese
• Traditional Chinese
• Russian
• Italian
• Spanish
• Portugal
• Nederlands

Download at source

Atlantis USX 2.2 Released

Atlantis USX is a software solution that accelerates performance and consolidates storage, increasing effective storage capacity to support running server workloads such as business-critical applications. USX builds on proven Atlantis compression, caching, deduplication, and tiering capabilities to provide a dramatically reduced storage footprint and improved performance, including built-in high availability. USX satisfies the storage requirements demanded by server workloads, removing the constraints of traditional storage.
With the new release the following new features came available.

• XenServer – USX now supports Citrix XenServer. XenServer can use any of the USX volume types. USX configuration, deployment, and management is the same for all platforms.
• New volume types:
  • The Hyper-Converged volume type supports server or VDI workloads and consumes only
    local resources. Hyper-Converged volumes are associated with an Infrastructure volume that
    provides shared storage so that the Hyper-Converged volume can migrate before entering
    maintenance mode even though the Hyper-Converged volume uses only local resources.
  • The Simple All Flash volume type supports persistent VDI deployments and enables you to
    use flash for both performance and capacity.
• Maintenance mode – A host can be placed into maintenance mode from the new Hypervisors Management screen in the USX GUI.
• Volume power operations and reboots can be performed from the Manage Volumes screen.
• LDAP authentication – Use the new LDAP Authentication screen to bind to an LDAP server so that members of a specified LDAP group can log into USX.
• Tree hierarchies are implemented for the display of datacenters, clusters, and hypervisors.
• SNMP configuration – A new document, Atlantis USX SNMP Configuration, provides a listing of the USX MIB and information about configuring USX to communicate with an SNMP trap host.

Atlantis USX 2.2 is now available in the download portal

Multiple Sessions in VMware Horizon View

When connecting to a floating pool using the View client, a user ended up receiving a new session despite having an existing session on another VM.

Analysis showed two desktop launch requests that came in from the same client connection in quick succession, spaced two seconds apart. Client log files imply the most likely scenario is that the user requested the desktop, immediately hit cancel on the wait dialog after the request was dispatched, and then launched it a second time. The View Connection Server correctly identified an existing disconnected session for the user while processing the first request at 13:18:57 for example, and provided the client with details to reconnect. The client dropped the Connection Server's response and sent a second request at 13:18:59. This in turn was routed to the same VM, but the request was rejected as the first connection was still being set up by the View Agent. At this point the Connection Server then fell back to providing the user with a new session as the original was unavailable.

Solution:
View 5.1.1 and onwards contains a hidden configuration option that will inform the Connection Server to not fall back and allocate a new session if it knows the user already has one, even if reconnecting to the session failed. In the specific case analyzed, if this was toggled the user would have received a connection error on the second launch request with the option to retry. Retrying a few seconds later would have succeeded.

VMware recommends that the option to disable the default fallback behaviour is enabled. Instructions for this are below:

• Ensure connection servers are running 5.1.1 or later
• Follow the steps to connect to the ADAM database at http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2012377
• Navigate to the object CN=Common,OU=Global,OU=Properties,DC=vdi,DC=vmware,DC=int
• In the Attribute Editor for the object, edit pae-NameValuePair attribute
• Making sure not to adjust any other values, add a new string to the attribute with value "cs-allowfallbackfromexistingsession=0" (no quotes)
• Click OK to close the editor dialog, your change is applied with no need to restart the servers
• To reverse the change, edit the attribute again and remove the above line

Verification:
To verify the fix has been applied, you may find the allowFallback value in a debug level line on any desktop launch. The line will have the following format:
 
  DEBUG getSessionForApplication, userDn: , appMap: {=, [...], allowFallback=false, [...]}