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#vExpert2019

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Good Afternoon friends, it’s been a while since I have posted anything to this fine blog. I promise, I will post more in 2019 as I expect to dive into new products and technologies.

Now, back to why you are reading this post. I’m proud to announce that I made the cut to participate in the VMware vExpert program for 2019. #Strumbelievable! This will be the 4th year that I have been selected to be a part of this program.

The VMware vCommunity is an amazing group of passionate IT folks who are always willing to lend a helping hand and share knowledge.

It’s also great to see that my friend and co-worker @Mike Dent also made the cut!

Congrats to all of the other vExperts out there, I’m looking forward to another great year!

Horizon View 7.5 Instant Clone Issues

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I was working with someone recently who upgraded their Horizon View environment to 7.5.1 recently who also updated their vCenter to 6.7 – mistake #1.(to get off of the old vCenter Web Client). The customer wasn’t in a position to upgrade their ESXi hosts to 6.7 due to some vendor compatibility issues that needed to be resolved via firmware issues. (mistake #2)

When pushing a new version of a Horizon Instant Clone, they were receiving the error: “Error during provisioning: Cloning of VM Win10-Prod has failed: Fault type is SERVER_FAULT_FATAL – Runtime error: No full links for internal VMs found”

Did I mention that VMware signed off on the version information via an SR?

What did we do to fix the issue? The customer had a small enough VDI environment that it was easy enough to delete the VDI Pools and vCenter and start over (100 clients, 2 Pools).

What would fix the issue: Upgrade your hosts to vSphere 6.7

Moral of the story: Ensure your customers understand the software lifecycle and walk them through the process of ensuring all applications that are dependent on each other are FULLY ready for an upgrade.

Don’t pull a homer.

VMware Horizon View & LetsEncrypt

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As most tech people, I like to build, destroy, rebuild and repeat. It’s what we do, its how we learn to do things. One of my latest deep-dives has been into Horizon View 7.X. A few years ago, I went down this path as well, and I bought a cert so that I could go through the setup.

Enter LetsEncrypt – Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated, and open certificate authority (CA), run for the public’s benefit. They provide certificates with a lifetime of 90 days and renewing a certificate is done within a couple of minutes, which is perfect for testing and home labs.

I started researching how I could use the LetsEncrypt certs with Horizon View and I couldn’t find much. Before we dive into how we make this happen, I first want to start out by saying using LetsEncrypt with Windows isn’t the simplest thing to do, So I used a CentOS Linux box – Super Small footprint for a cert generator. I’m not a Linux expert, so using and getting to know CentOS was also a learning experience.

So, in this article, I will go through the steps to get the cert, as well as applying them to Horizon View.

Installing LetsEncrypt

As mentioned above, I am using a CentOS machine to obtain the certs.

  • Log into the CentOS machine as root
  • First, we have to install and enable the EPEL repository
    • sudo yum install epel-release
  • Now, we can install certbot – certbot is just an application that goes out and gets the certs
    • sudo yum install certbot

Now that we have Certbot configured, we can now move on to Request the Certificate

Request a Certificate

*Note: change the items in red to match your needs

  1. Run the following command on your Linux box.
    • certbot certonly –manual –email xxxx@gmail.com -d server.vthistle.net –rsa-key-size 2048
  2. Agree to the ToS
  3. Decide if you want to share your email with LetsEncrypt
  4. Answer the question about “Are you ok with your IP being logged” as the IP requesting the cert
  5. Create a page on a web sever with the challenge key to prove you are in ownership of the site

  6. When the request has been validated, you will see a “CONGRATULATIONS“
  7. Browse to /etc/letsencrypt/live/site.domain.com/
    1. You will find the following files:
      • cert.pem —-> Server Certificate
      • chain.pem —> Root and Intermediate Certs
      • fullchaim.pem –> Server, intermediate and root chain
      • privkey.pem —> Private key for Server Certificate

Convert PEM to PFX with Private Key

  1. Copy the files listed above from your Linux box to a windows box and use OpenSSL
  2. Run: openssl.exe pkc12 -export -out view.pfx -inkey privkey.pem -in cert.pem -certfile chain.pem
  3. You will then copy your “view.pfx” file that you can use on your Horizon View Server

Adding the new Cert to the Connection/Security Servers

  1. The process to replace the certs on the Connection Server and Security Servers are the same: open MMC.exe -> File -> Add/Remove Snap-in… -> Select Certificates -> Add:
  2. Change the “friendly name” of the default certificate to something other than vdm
  3. Go through the import wizard and ensure you check the box to “Mark this key as exportable“
  4. Change the “Friendly Name” to vdm and restart the “VMware View Connection Server” service

Complete – Your View Connection Server is now using you 90 day LetsEncrypt certificate. 

NFS 4.1 – Synology – VMware

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I was recently studying for my VMware 6.5 Delta Cert and realized NFS 4.1 was on the blueprint. I don’t do much (if any) NFS at customers sites – so I wanted to upgrade my lab from NFS 3 to 4.1. have a small homelab, which consists of the following gear: 2 Intel NUCs, Synology 713+ and a Iomega PX300D. I run NFS off of the Synology, mostly because I was lazy and didnt want to setup iSCSI.

To enable NFS 4.1 on the Synology, I had to update some config files.  *From Synology Support – Do this at your own risk! :

  1. Enable SSH from Control Panel |  Terminal and SNMP
  2. Connect to the Synology using your favorite SSH utility
  3. cd /usr/syno/etc/rc.sysv
  4. sudo vi S83nfsd.sh
  5. Go to line 91 (in my case) – go to “/usr/sbin/nfsd $N” and add “-V 4.1”
    1. Finished product will be: “/usr/sbin/nfsd $N -V 4.1”
  6. Save the file and Exit.
  7. Restart the NFS Service: sudo ./S83nfsd.sh restart
  8. Verify NFS 4.1 is now enabled
  9. In the vSphere Web Client: Unmount the NFS datastore & remount as NFS 4.1
  10. Disable SSH on your Synology

Complete!

Horizon View 7.2 – Help Desk

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I have been a fan of VMware Horizon View since I was introduced to it back in the 5.x days. There was something about the simplicity of its components. One thing I thought Horizon View was missing was a feature that Citrix has had in XenApp/XenDesktop, in Citrix Director since the early 7.X days. There hasn’t been a good way to see what is going on with a users session. Sure, you could use vRops, but it wasn’t real time.

With VMware Horizon View 7.2, VMware has added what it calls “Help Desk”

Now, before I go much further with this post, you should know that VMware has only enabled this AMAZING feature for Horizon licensing, Advanced and Enterprise. If you remember, they did the same thing when they introduced “Instant Clones”, which made sense because most use cases for Instant Clones would be seen in larger environments. With the Help Desk tool, this is something even the smallest Horizon View environment could see a huge benefit from. Ok, I will stop venting, I don’t make those decisions.

So, lets look at how to access the tool, as well as a few features.

How to Access:

  1. You can access the Help Desk tool by connecting to your access link: https://<FQDN>/helpdesk | You will be prompted to login with your credentials.
  2. Open the Horizon View Admin Page, and click Help Desk – Using this method will automatically sign you in with the credentials you signed into the admin page with

Features

  • Entitlements: I’ve seen in numerous environment where users are individually entitled to pools and applications. The Help Desk tool can quickly show you what a user is entitled to. 
  • Sessions Stats: Yes, you can now see session stats!
    • You can see how many sessions a user has open.You can click on the session and see the stats about that session. Note: If a user is logged into a desktop, you can also offer remote assistance from the tool.

Hopefully VMware decides to open this up to the Standard licensing in the upcoming versions.

Enjoy!