I was recently asked by a colleague how to meter the use of VMware ThinApp packages.

What is metering?

Metering is monitoring ThinApp package usage for licensing, compliance, auditing or monitoring.

For example, if Organization_A is licensed for 50 copies of Notepad++ and Organization_A thinapp's Notepad++, how do they ensure they remain in compliance? Or, if someone us distributing ThinApp packages from a cloud service provider, how do they easily manage and monitor all of the application users?

I’ve been asked more and more lately to provide a strategy on managing a segregated VMware View environment with only one management console.

Most of the time, the customer assumes they need two completely separate VMware View environments, when what they ultimately want can often be accomplished by leveraging the Tag feature of VMware View.

How do Tags work?

A Connection Server can have one or many Tags associated with it. A Desktop Pool can also have one or many Tags associated with it.

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Several times a week I'm working with customers on designing, implementing, tweaking or customizing their particular VDI solution.

I've been a part of some very cool projects and have had to address some very specific needs.

One of the customer requirements I recently had to work with was:

• The existing Windows XP workstations must boot and force the VMware View Client to launch immediately.

I often get engaged to help customers choose between the proper zero/thin/thick clients on the market for their particular VDI solution. One topic of conversation that often comes up is USB connectivity, redirection and speed.

Before the discussion can be held in full, it is important to clarify the difference between how Microsoft’s current Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) handles USB disk drives and how VMware View using PCoIP handles the same situation.

The user account used by VMware View Composer to join computers to the domain needs to have the ability to add and move Computer accounts in and out of the Computers container (as new computer accounts joined to the domain, unless pre-staged, end up in the Computers container first, and are then moved to the appropriate OU defined in the QuickPrep settings:

For a 2000 or 2003 Active Directory Domain:

For those out there building custom solutions for their Android-based tablet/device, it is important to understand what processor the device is using. One of the devices I recently had the opportunity to test was a unit from Archos. With the announcement of the Cisco Cius this week, I imagine more and more solution developers will be poking around their Android tablets to build innovative solutions.

VMware vCenter AppSpeed is a solid product that is used to measure performance-based SLAs and provide bottle-neck analysis.

The installation in version 1.2 is a lot easier than it was in 1.0, making it a series of check boxes and basic configuration settings versus the multitude of steps it took with the first release.

However, after you get your VMware AppSpeed appliance built, it's pretty easy to erase all of the hard work.

For those that implement VMware solutions for environments that require FIPS compliance (e.g. US Federal Government customers), the VMware Lab Manager 4 installation may break with, “Error 28047: Setup failed to launch.” A look at the log shows, “system.InvalidOperationException: This implementation is not part of the Windows Platform FIPS validated cryptographic algorithm.”

Tales from the field; while being at a customer site who needed to reboot their ESX hosts (and thus put their hosts in Maintenance Mode), who found that their 2-host cluster hung at 2% while initiating VMware Maintenance Mode, the fix is below:

• Ensure Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS) is enabled

As a virtualization consultant, you hear the complaint that "the storage is slow" from nearly every customer. To diagnose this problem, first you start with learning the configuration of the storage network and then move on to lower levels. As a starting point, I glance over the highest disk latencies statistics per host in the VI client and the latency results from esxtop.

For anyone that has spent time working with most any VMware API/SDK, used the HealthAnalyzer tool, or looked at a .vmx file, you may be familiar with the GuestId field. This value is intended to specify the guest operating system being installed on the virutal machine so the correct version of the VMware Tools package could be used.

For those that don't know me, part of my job involves educating customers on the benefits of technologies such as server virtualization and VDI.

I'm not only involved in design and implementation work, but I'm also involved in helping customers make decisions.

I have colleagues and friends at companies that lug around two beefy laptops in this configuration:

• Laptop #1 = Running VMware Workstation that in turn runs all the VMs necessary for VMware View

As I wrote in this article for TechTarget, VMware's partner-tool, RAWC (Reference Architecture Workload Simulator [where's the C?]) is a great tool for stressing a virtual infrastructure before, during or after a VMware View implementations.

RAWC is apparently the brain child of Fred Schimscheimer (VMware - Senior Technical Marketing Manager). Kudos to Fred!

Here are a few scenarios in which I use the tool:

SCENARIO 1

Late last week I was involved with a VMware View 4 + Samsung zero client solution and I thought I would give a quick overview of the Teradici Management Console for those that haven't seen it yet.

The Teradici Management Console is used to manage zero client assets in the enterprise. For example, zero clients running pre-3.x firmware could not be enabled for VMware View connectivity until they were upgraded. If you have 1 or 2 zero clients, you can manually update the firmware without too much trouble.

Have you ever wanted to carry around a desktop or laptop in your pocket? If so, I hope you have some uber-cool cargo pants with reinforced stitching.

For the rest of us, there have been a slew of mobile apps enabling devices such as Blackberries and iPhones to RDP/VNC into a server or desktop.