VDI – Everything-Virtual

Category: VDI

V-locity 5 Install and Configuration

So I was recently offered the chance to test drive V-locity 5 to see how it compared against the previous V-locity VM product that I tested nearly two years ago, one of the big differences between the two products is that this time I am using the V-locity Management Console (VMC) as my centralised management and deployment tool.

This post covers the installation and configuration of the VMC and the deployment of agents via it.

One of the first things I noticed after downloading the installation file from the Condusiv Technologies website was that the new package came in quite a lot smaller in size than the previous version, I mean like about 50% smaller, now considering this includes the VMC as well as the V-locity package you have to hand it to the developers with regards to size reduction.

Supported Platforms for the VMC and V-locity agents, as you can see you’re not restricted to either physical or virtual for either the VMC or agents.

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17th July 2015
Condusiv V-locity 5 Testing

Nearly two years ago I was given the opportunity to take out the Condusiv Technologies V-locity VM version 4 product for a spin in my home lab, the results were pretty positive and certainly something I would suggest to anyone running a Windows estate to investigate.

Move forward a couple of years and I was contacted by their technical director after having filled out an online questionnaire, he remembered my blog articles and wondered if I wanted to take the new version of V-locity 5 out for a spin to see how it compared, V-locity 5 now combines both the V-locity VM and V-locity Server products under one product banner.

V-locity is an I/O reduction software solution that increases application performance in virtual, physical and cloud environments by 50% or more without the cost of additional hardware
Dramatically Faster Application Performance
Target Applications
Performance Validation
Seamless Deployment and Management (more…)

The VCA4-DT exam has been out for a while now and whilst there still isn’t a required attendance on a course there also isn’t a great deal of training material out there for the exam.

The following material can be used to aid your study for the exam, it’s important to note that the VCA4-DT exam covers View 4.6 so in your preparation please make sure you’re evaluating View 4.6 and not View 5.0.

White Papers and Blue Print

Your first port of call should be the following VMware documentation.

VMware VCA4-DT Blue Print 1.3
VMware View 4.6 Administration Guide
VMware View 4.6 Installation Guide

Evaluation Software

Downloading the trial for View 4.6 directly from VMware currently only works if you’re already licensed for it so I have provided an alternative download location for the 4.6.0 software here.

View Composer 2.6.0-349155
View Connection Server x86-64 4.6.0-366101
View Client x86-x64 4.6.0-366101
View Client x86 4.6.0-366101.exe
View Client with local mode x86-64 4.6.0-366101
View Client for Mac – 4.6.0-366101

Additional Training Material

There are a number of additional guides out there that can be useful to help train you further in the use of VMware View 4.5 \ 4.6, the following book should be considered if you want to further your knowledge for the VCA4-DT

Administrating VMware View 4.5 – Authors Edition by Mike Laverick – I spoke with Mike at the last VMUG and asked for his permission to link the book from my site.
TrainSignal VMware View 4 Administration Training training by Brian Knudtson.

Finally

Have a look over on the VMware VCA4-DT website for links to the mock exam and community forums.

Good luck

VMware View 9 Day Bootcamp

VMware are releasing a 9 day VMware View Bootcamp Series covering all aspects of virtual desktops.

There will be 9 videos, each video released daily starting on the 19th July.

Topics covered over the 9 days are :-

Day 1 – Design Considerations Guidelines for VMware View – Overview

Speaker – John Dodge, Sr. Manager PSO Services, VMware
Overview of the technical considerations to keep in mind while you’re designing a View environment

Day 2 – Storage Deep Dive – Considerations and Best Practices

Speaker – Jim Yanik, Sr. Systems Engineer, VMware
How to design your storage infrastructure to fit your environment
Sizing and workload considerations

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ThinApp’d vSphere Client Error – “The type initializer for ‘xr’ threw an exception”

I have been using the ThinApp’d version of the vSphere client that I created on my desktop PC rather than installing the thick client, it’s obviously smaller and cleaner and until recently hadn’t caused me any issues.

I was installing the Xangati OVF and decided to add the vDS (vNetwork Distributed Switch) to my homelab environment when I got this message.

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ThinApp – How to virtualise the vSphere Client (4.1u1)

As promised yesterday here is a quick tutorial showing how to ThinApp the vSphere client, so as to reduce the package size as much as possible the work was carried out on a fully patched Windows XP SP3 machine with the J# redist installed as well.

The entire process from start to finish took about 30 minutes so I have edited the video to cut out long and boring installation routines.

A couple of things to note is that I never managed to get my client down to the same size that VMware have but to my defence this is my first attempt at using ThinApp but I did get it down to a respectable 133mb and also that this is my first attempt at video creation, also this video doesn’t contain any sound but future releases will do.

One thing missing from the video is that testing of the client was carried out on a Windows 7 virtual machine, this machine had no additional software installed on it (unlike the XP machine that had the J# redist).

If there are any questions please don’t hesitate to ask.

ThinApp’d vSphere Client 4.1u1 from My-TechVideos.com on Vimeo.

VMware ThinApp 4.6 Starter Bundle Licensing Issues

About six months back when VMware had a deal going where if you purchased VMware Workstation you also received a license for VMware ThinApp Starter Bundle I decided to take the plunge and made the purchase (it was also at the time when workstation had a $50 discount going on).

Before now I hadn’t really had any reason to install ThinApp but recently I had decided to try my hand at packaging up the vSphere client using ThinApp (like VMware have done with the 4.1 release but my aim was to do it with the 4.1u1 release).

Last night I decided to install ThinApp on a dedicated ThinApp machine (Windows XP SP3) but ran into an issue when it came to actually licensing the application.

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