VMware Horizon View 5.3 is now generally available (GA) for download. View 5.3 brings a number of cool features and if you haven’t heard about them yet be sure to check out my VMware Horizon View 5.3 announcement post. Lots of improvements for such a tiny version number change!
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If you haven’t already heard, VisualEsxtop is a Fling developed by a few VMware Engineers that provides a java based GUI to the every useful ESXTOP. As an added bonus provides a description of each counter, multiple windows, the ability to sort metrics, and even provide basic graphs. Oh and it’s FREE!
Setup and install on Windows 7 is pretty easy as well:
When maintaining a Horizon View environment I like to keep my parent images as small as possible and over time a thin provision disk can start to grow on you if you don’t watch it – be it from downloading installers, updates, or even running disk defrag. While there isn’t a simple, one click button in the View Administrator Console there is a fairly easy manual method using vmfkstools.
Before we can use “vmkfstools” to shrink the VMDK file we must zero out any unused space on the thin provisioned disk. A simple way of doing this is by using a free utility called SDelete from Sysinternals.
VMware has released an update to vCenter 5.5 Server. The new updated, numbered 5.5.0a doesn’t appear to add any new features but instead focus on squishing a number of bugs in the 5.5 version – mostly around vCenter Single-Sign-On and the vSphere web client.
Issues resolved with this release are as follows:
Ever work on a View 5.x Desktop issue and needed access to the desktop it self while in use? While not a feature that is easily enabled say via the vmTools or the View Administrator console – it can however be easily enabled via Group Policy, similar to some other settings that I mention in the Windows 7 Optimization Guide.
Horizon View 5.2 is receiving an update to 5.3! Doesn’t sound like much, but in that tiny dot number increase VMware has in fact brought a number improvements and features to Horizon View.
In a nut shell, some features Horizon View 5.3 brings is the ability to connect to a virtual desktop from any HTML5 capable web browser (yes, even Chromebook!), ability to bring full workstation class user experience with 3D graphics, deploy Windows Server 2008 as a desktop, as well as completely rewritten the Windows client with support for Windows 8.1 and a new iOS7 client too.
In more detail, Horizon View 5.3 brings…
After performing my home lab upgrade, ESXi now runs from a USB stick and because of that vSphere would complain that the system logs where on non-persistent storage:
If I wanted I could have ran the vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) as it comes with it’s own syslog server, or I could have used something like KIWI or Splunk to be my syslog server. I instead went the route of my Synology NAS as it too has the ability to act as a syslog server and these are the steps I performed to setting it up.
During the San Francisco VMworld 2013, VMware announced the start of their new VMware Certified Associate certifications.
There’s no training class requirement for the new exams although VMware offers a free self-paced e-learning course which is recommended to help you prepare for the exams. The exams normally run $120.00 but VMware is currently running a $60.00 discount for those who take the exam in 2013. NTPRO.nl has an additional coupon code (VCA13ICS) to take the remaining $60.00 off making the exam FREE!
The VCA13ICS coupon code expires on October 30, 2013!
Update:
Global Knowledge also has a coupon code (VCA13GKN) which does not expire until January 31, 2014. Limit one free exam per individual!
So VMware hasn’t exactly made it easy to locate the vSphere client download and given the clients importance in managing your VMware environment I’ve compiled a list of the direct download links for both old and new vSphere clients.
ESXi 5.5 was just released general availability (GA) on Sunday (9/22) and I’m itching to upgrade the home lab to run the latest version with all it’s goodies. I wanted to try upgrading my hosts without having to go through the same process that I followed setting up ESXi on the NUC in the first place, injecting custom NIC drivers, etc.
Enter the command line…
