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I found this post on the VMware Communities that could be interesting to VCDX4 people;

Source: http://communities.vmware.com/message/2037410

The VMware Horizon application manager team is very excited to announce Horizon Application Manager 1.5. The product will be available this quarter as a new virtual appliance, allowing the product to be installed on a customer’s premise for the first time ever. This version will also be sold through VMware’s channel and sales force and made available internationally for the first time.

For those of you that are not familiar with VMware Horizon Application Manager, it simplifies IT by providing a unified application catalog for management and provisioning of virtualized Windows applications, enterprise web applications and SaaS applications.

Horizon was designed to directly address the consumerization of IT occurring in the enterprise. It does this by securely delivering diverse apps to end-users on the devices of their choice. This user-centric management platform enables IT to extend corporate policy and control to applications and services across the public and private cloud. We do all of this with an identity centric management layer that allows IT to regain much of the control that is so often lost by the proliferation of the three headed monsters of cloud services, public networks and smart devices.

Horizon Application Manager 1.5 is full of new features, which will enable IT to control, manage and deliver policy driven application services to end-users across every device. Enhancements include:

• Horizon Application Manager Appliance – Now offered as a VMware vSphere-based virtual appliance for on-premise, private cloud configurations. This deployment model allows for a faster time to value with both reduced deployment time and costs, and we have added cloud based update service which enables non-disruptive patching and updates.
• Horizon Enterprise Connector – The new Horizon Enterprise Connector supports end-user authentication and single-sign on through Horizon to existing directory services, profiles and policies without making changes or disrupting existing directory architectures.
• Horizon Operator – Because Horizon was designed from the ground up to support organizations of all sizes and complexity, we made it multi-tenant capable. Horizon Operator delivers a management console for the operator across multiple organizations / tenants. Operators are able to create, manage and report across all organizations within the system while creating delegated, role based administrators within organizations.
• Horizon Administrator – The Horizon Administrator console is a single integrated, web-based platform for end-user and application management, policy and reporting.
• Horizon Policy Manager – With granular policy control, administrators have the ability to easily define policies and enable secure, controlled access for bring-your-own-device (BYOD) initiatives for end-user access by context like location, connectivity and device..
• Horizon Workspace – By providing one workspace available across all platforms, Horizon Workspace delivers a consistent end-user experience with single sign-on across all devices to access applications. The device aware workspace takes the guesswork out of the end-user experience, while providing federated identity management across public and private cloud applications.
• Horizon Application Catalog – The unified application catalog in Horizon Workspace delivers a single IT view of all entitled Windows, SaaS and Web applications across the public and private cloud. The catalog comes with an inventory of industry leading SaaS applications to streamline deployment. In addition, IT is able to add new applications to customize the catalog to support existing enterprise web and ThinApp applications. Expanded support of VMware ThinApp virtualized Windows applications enables IT to gain control of leases and patch updates to end-users.
• Horizon Client for Windows – provides support for ThinApp Windows application delivery and syncing to Windows based client devices.
• VMware ThinApp – now included as part of the perpetual licensed offering of Horizon Application Manager, ThinApp simplifies Windows applications management and reduces the cost and complexity of delivery. This application virtualization solution isolates applications from their underlying operating systems and from other applications to eliminate application conflicts. Through Horizon Application Manager, organizations can now streamline the delivery and management of ThinApp applications to end-users.
• Expanded Authentication Support – Support for SAML and OAuth2, with alignment to open standards ensuring the vast majority of enterprise SaaS applications are supported.
• Horizon Extension Services – Delivering APIs to enable the integration of Horizon data into existing systems and processes enable Horizon to extend the value of existing investments. Easily integrate into existing wokflow or reporting systems and bring the added insight from Horizon into the organization.

As you can see with this extensive list of features, VMware Horizon Application Manager is ready to help manage the major paradigm shifts that are under way in the enterprise. More information can be found over here at the VMware End-User Computing Blog.

Yesterday VMware has announced View 5.1,  below you can find all the new features within this new release:

• Storage Optimization – New in View 5.1, View Storage Accelerator is a technology that reduces storage loads generated by peak VDI storage reads caching the common blocks of desktop images into local host memory. The Accelerator leverages a VMware vSphere (version 5.0 or later) platform feature called Content Based Read Cache (CBRC) implemented inside the ESX/ESXi hypervisor. When enabled for specific VMs, the host hypervisor scans the storage disk blocks to generate digests of the block contents. When these blocks are read into the hypervisor, they are cached in the host based CBRC. Subsequent reads of blocks with the same digest will be served from the in-memory cache directly.  This significantly improves the desktop performance, especially during boot storms or anti-virus scanning storms when a large number of blocks with identical contents are read. 
• View Persona Management – To help with physical to virtual desktop migrations, we’ve extended View Persona Management to physical desktops.  This new feature also enables Windows XP to Windows 7 migration. The View Persona Management agent can be installed without the VMware View agent on physical desktops belonging to the same licensed VMware View desktop end-users. During a physical to virtual migration, an administrator can first install View Persona Management on the physical desktop. When the same user uses a virtual desktop with Persona Management enabled, user data and settings are automatically synchronized. We also extend Persona Management to support a one-time Windows XP to Windows 7 migration.
• VMware vCenter Operations for View – New for VMware View 5.1, we have integrated with our management products to give you VMware vCenter Operations (vCOps) Manager for View.  Optimized for virtual desktop deployments, VMware vCenter Operations Manager for View provides end-to-end monitoring of desktops and users, displayed with user friendly dashboards, to help identify, troubleshoot, and trend potential issues.
• View Administrator Enhancements – Some customers deploy VMware View in a restrictive environment in which write access to the Active Directory is prohibited. In this new version of View, an administrator can set a configuration option to reuse existing machine accounts in AD during the provisioning process. As the numbers of VMware View deployments grow, our customers are expanding the scale of their View virtual desktop programs. Enhancements made in VMware View 5.1, make management at scale easier. VMware View Composer server in View 5.1 can be installed in a standalone server. An administrator can also configure VMware View Connection Server (via vdmadmin command line tool) to log events in syslog rather than a database. Last but not least, View Admin UI response time has been greatly improved in a large-scale environment.
• View Administrator Language Support – To serve a growing international customer base, the View Admin UI is localized to five major non-English languages: French, German, Japanese, Korean, and Simplified Chinese.
• USB Enhancements – We have reworked the USB redirect feature for the Windows client.  The new USB feature no longer requires device driver to be installed on the client side. A generic USB arbitrator is implemented on the client side, while a proper USB hub is implemented in the agent. This allows VMware View to support a much broader range of USB devices while supporting fine-grained remote device policy (e.g. enable/disable mass storage file copy) even on multi-function USB devices.
• RADIUS Support – Based on customer feedback, we’ve extended the security authentication support in VMware View to other two-factor authentication vendors leveraging a RADIUS client in the View 5.1 Connection Server. This gives you more choice when implementing single sign-on or security tokens into your virtual desktops.
• Continued PCoIP Enhancements – We also continuously strive to enhance the PCoIP remote protocol following the significant progress made in version 5.0. We realize that optimal remote protocol performance cannot be achieved with code improvement alone.

At this time it’s not possible to download the software yet, however it will be avaiable in Q2 of this year.

Last September, VMware provided a glimpse into the future. It demonstrated a new technology, called Project Octopus, that promised to be the first viable Enterprise cloud file sharing application. The way people manage and share information within the Enterprise is changing, and Project Octopus is at the forefront of meeting these new needs.

Today, with the announcement of the Project Octopus Beta, VMware is taking a significant step toward empowering users to securely access files on any device from anywhere. Unlike other solutions, Octopus can be deployed on-premise or accessed via a VMware service provider, and either way, Octopus provides IT with the ability to govern usage and set policies for data access and sharing.

The beta is open to all and will last through VMworld. Due to limited support resources, priority will be placed on customers with active engagements. Go to Project Octopus Beta website to register.

Lately I was packaging the vSphere PowerCLI and vSphere CLI with VMware ThinApp. And after I created the Thinapps they are running just fine. However the name in the pop-up bar (that popup window when you start the ThinApp) was showing something else than I had expected.

This happend because the vSphere CLI runs from a command prompt (CMD) so the ThinApp pop-up name is “Windows Command Processor” as shown below in the screenshot.

Not a big issue, but it doesn’t look nice, so a quick search in the “package.ini” didn’t show me any setting that I could change to give it the correct name. So I start to read the documentation but didn’t find anything useful either. At last I found a solution on the VMware Communities forum, where some one else posted that you need to add the following line “StatusbarDisplayName=APPLICATIONNAME” in the package.ini, just below the [appname.exe] line, as shown here in the example below.

After you rebuild the ThinApp package and start it, it will display the correct name.

Unfortuatly it’s not possible to disable the pop-up window, but at least it’s showing the correct name

RVTools is a windows .NET 2.0 application which uses the VI SDK to display information about your virtual machines and ESX hosts. Interacting with VirtualCenter 2.5, ESX Server 3.5, ESX Server 3i, ESX Server 4i, VirtualCenter 4.0, ESX server 4.0, VirtualCenter 4.1, ESX Server 4.1, VirtualCenter 5.0, VirtualCenter Appliance or ESX Server 5 RVTools is able to list information about VMs, CPU, Memory, Disks, Partitions, Network, Floppy drives, CD drives, Snapshots, VMware tools, ESX hosts, HBAs, Nics, Switches, Ports, Distributed Switches, Distributed Ports, Service consoles, VM Kernels, Datastores and health checks. With RVTools you can disconnect the cd-rom or floppy drives from the virtual machines and RVTools is able to update the VMware Tools installed inside each virtual machine to the latest version.

What’s new in version 3.3;

• GetWebResponse timeout value changed from 5 minutes to 10 minutes (for very big environments)
• New tabpage with HBA information
• On vDatastore tab the definition of the Provisioned MB and In Use MB columns was confusing! This is changed now.
• RVToolsSendMail accepts now multiple recipients (semicolon is used as separator)
• Folder information of VMs and Templates are now visible on vInfo tabpage
• Bugfix: data in comboboxes on filter form are now sorted
• Bugfix: Problem with api version 2.5.0 solved
• Bugfix: Improved exception handling on vCPU tab.
• Bugfix: Improved exception handling on vDatastore tab.

Kudos to Rob de Veij for this awesome tool!!

You can download the RVTools 3.3 from Rob’s website at robware.net

Finally, the word is out. Yesterday VMware announced the vExpert 2012 title holders.

I’m very happy to say that I’m one of them for the first time . I want to congratulate all of you who have also achieved the vExpert title.

Big thanks goes to the whole VMware team, John Troyer and last but not least Alex Maier.

This title will give me a big energy boost to post more and more virtualization and cloud related blog posts on a regular basis!

To all other vExperts out there: Congratulations!!!

Lately when I was trying to build my vLab for the upcoming VCAP exams, I had a little challenge to get HA working on my two node cluster. Because this vLab is running on top of my existing vSphere 5 environment, I have assigned no more than 2GB of vRAM to each ESXi 4.1 host.

Installation and the initial configuration went all fine, until I tried to add the ESXi host to the vCenter Server; I received a warning message “Cannot complete the configuration of the HA agent on the host”.

Okay, that’s not much information but after a quick look in the Task & Events tab I saw that the installation of the HA agent won’t start because the ramdisk can’t be created, see the screenshot below.

The next step I have taken is a quick look at the ESXi host itself, when installing the HA agent you can track the installation process by viewing the /var/log/vmware/vpx-iupgrade.log.

As mentioned above here, the vCenter gives an error message that the ramdisk can’t be created. On the ESXi host you can see the same message but with some extra interesting information, it states that there is no more space to create the ramdrive.

Okay, that’s cool because according to the VMware documentation 2GB should be enough. However VMware says this in there documentation (ESXi Installable and vCenter Server Setup Guide, page 13): “2GB RAM minimum. For upgrades, 3GB RAM is required if the ESXi host is managed by vCenter Server”.

So is it 2GB or 3GB when the ESXi host is managed by the vCenter Server? Well when I see the above error I will believe it should be more than 2GB So I shutdown the ESXi hosts and add 1GB extra to the virtual machine, so in total the virtual ESXi hosts will have 3GB of RAM available.

Now that the ESXi hosts have more RAM I tried to add the hosts to the vCenter Server and the HA/DRS Cluster, and it actually worked, the hosts are now added to vCenter and the HA agent is active