WilliamLam.com

  • About
    • About
    • Privacy
  • VMware Cloud Foundation
  • VKS
  • Homelab
    • Hardware Options
    • Hardware Reviews
    • Lab Deployment Scripts
    • Nested Virtualization
    • Homelab Podcasts
  • VMware Nostalgia
  • Apple

Horizon View in a box using new Horizon View Config Tool

03.07.2014 by William Lam // 1 Comment

The folks over at VMware Labs have really been on fire lately. Last week, they help release another exciting new Fling called Horizon View Configuration Tool. This latest Fling, also known as VCT was developed by Marilyn Basanta, who works over in our EUC organization. Marilyn's goal for this first release of VCT was simple, to enable customers to easily and quickly deploy a basic Horizon View 5.3 environment from scratch. I had the chance to meet up with Marilyn this week in person to discuss some of my feedback regarding VCT and something that really stood out to me was that she really understood the importance of Automation. If you compare this to the manual approach today, which has many moving parts not to mention the learning curve for new VMware customers , you can see why a solution like VCT would be a valuable tool for our customers.

vct-5
After VCT was announced, I knew I had to give this a spin in my home lab! After quickly glancing at the documentation, I deployed VCT and found a couple of interesting tidbits that you should be aware of before getting started.

  • In addition to deploying VCT, you will need to also deploy the VMware Studio virtual appliance which is used to provision Windows OSes
  • A standalone ESXi host that is not managed by vCenter Server
  • All virtual machines provisioned by VCT are "Zeroed Thick" and not Thin (minus VCT/Studio as you can specify)
  • At least 19GB of memory is required, not including desktops you would provision

I went through a "full" VCT deployment in my home lab which I also included an Active Directory instance and here are the resource requirements for each Virtual Machine which I know some folks were interested in:

VM vCPU vMEM vDISK DISK TYPE
View Config Tool 1 512 MB 14 GB THIN
VMware Studio 1 512 MB 50 GB THIN
Active Directory 2 2 GB 16 GB ZEROED THICK
VCSA 2 8 GB 125 GB ZEROED THICK
Horizon View 2 4 GB 20 GB ZEROED THICK
Horizon Composer 2 4 GB 20 GB ZEROED THICK

For a first release where a user can just provide a Windows Server 2008 ISO and specify a couple of parameters and just sit back and watch this entire environment provision automatically is very impressive. However, I thought what would be even cooler is if we can further reduce the barrier for customers to try out this awesome tool. I did a bit of digging around in the VCT appliance and found that there are a couple of "tweaks" err "hacks" that you could perform to help reduce the footprint of your Horizon View setup.

Disclaimer: These optimizations is something that I spoke to Marilyn about and among other things and she is well aware of some of these early limitations which hopefully will be addressed in future releases of VCT.

For optimization #1 and #2, you will need to perform this before you start the VCT wizard. For optimization #3, this can be done after your Horizon View environment is up and running

Optimization # 1 - Enable "Thin" provisioning of VCSA

SSH to your VCT appliance and edit the following file /apache-tomcat-7.0.27/webapps/vct/WEB-INF/classes/deploy_vCenter.py and ensure it looks like the below (changes highlighted in blue):

deploy_vm = ["/ovftool/ovftool", "-n=" + name, "-ds=" + datastore, "-dm=thin", "-nw=" + network, "--acceptAllEulas", "--noSSLVerify", vcenter_path, "vi://" + esx_username + ":" + esx_password + "@" + esx_host ]

Optimization # 2 - Enable "Thin" provisioning for Windows VMs (View, Composer & AD)

SSH to your VCT appliance and edit the following file /apache-tomcat-7.0.27/webapps/vct/WEB-INF/classes/deploy_ova_studio.py and ensure it looks like the below (changes highlighted in blue):

ssh_command = "sh /opt/vmware/share/ovftool/ovftool --name=\"" + name + "\" --datastore=\"" + datastore + "\" -dm=thin --network=\"" + network + "\" " + path + " vi://" + esx_username + ":" + esx_password + "@" + esx_host

Optimization # 3 - Reduce VCSA memory

For a small environments or POCs, you can run VCSA with 4GB of memory. The default from VMware is 8GB, but this is not the minimal and will depend on the size of your environment (# of VMs/Hosts).

With these simple modifications, you can significantly reduce the amount of storage required and more importantly reduce the amount of memory down to ~14GB if not more due to other memory saving techniques such as VMware TPS. If you already have an existing Active Directory server, you can even further reduce it. The primary reason I was interested in reducing the resource requirements (which I am always a fan of) is that I wanted to demonstrate that you could easily get a fully working Horizon View environment running on top of an Apple Mac Mini! How cool is that!? I mean anyone can be walking around with a Mac Mini that includes everything to run or demo a full Horizon View 5.3 environment. The deployment in my environment took about ~3hrs, I suspect it was slow due to my spinning rust and it should be much faster on an SSD. I was also able to get away with just needing 91.8 GB of storage (all powered on) for the base infrastructure, of course you should allocate a bit more if you want to actually deploy additional desktops.

vct-10
I  highly recommend those of you who are interested in Horizon View to give VCT a try and if you have any feedback or features you would like to see, please leave a comment on the Flings webpage. I know Marilyn is very interested in hearing customer feedback and how she and her team can better improve VCT in the future. Great job again Marilyn, very cool solution and glad to see there is no shortage of innovation at VMware!

Categories // Apple, Horizon View, VCSA, vSphere 5.5 Tags // Fling, horizon composer, horizon view, mac mini, VCSA, VCT, vcva, vSphere 5.5

VMware Labs releases Proactive DRS Fling from last years Fling Contest

08.27.2013 by William Lam // 1 Comment

Last year, the VMware Labs team ran an Open Innovation contest where users could submit ideas for Flings that they would like to see get built. In addition to that, one lucky winner will be selected and their idea will actually be sponsored internally within VMware R&D and VMware Engineers would then implement that idea. The winner of that contest was Mike Preston on an idea called Proactive DRS:

“What I would like to see is some sort of appliance/script that can hook into both the vCenter Operations API’s as well as the vSphere APIs and merge these two technologies together. By interpreting vCenter Operations predictions for what is going to happen within your environment and then leveraging vMotion/DRS/DPM to prepare for this before it happens we could be left with a more proactive approach. (I.E. Historically VM1 will utilize 100% CPU at 4am in the morning, let’s be sure these resources are available on the host at 3:45 by migrating other VMs off, rather than waiting for DRS to kick in at 4:05 – At 6am everyday my workload normally increases to the point where DPM kicks in and turns on some hosts, let’s turn these on at based on the vCenter Operations stats rather than having to manually configure a setting to do so).”

Today at the VMware R&D Innovation booth at VMworld, the VMware Labs team has just announced that they will be releasing the Proactive DRS Fling (download coming very soon!). I think this is pretty awesome, I mean how cool is that, an idea that you came up with was implemented by a group of VMware Engineers? Congrats on the awesome idea Mike!

Here is a bit more details on how Proactive DRS works:  

It is a way for DRS to react to changes in the virtual cluster, and to act on predicted changes in resource demands before hosts become stressed. For example, if you have a VM that historically uses 100% CPU at 8am every morning, ProactiveDRS  makes  sure that the CPU resources will be available for that VM before 8am. These actions ensure that your cluster runs smoother and reduces the amount of reactive VM rebalances that occur.

Features

  • Given an advance forecast/prediction of each VM’s resource demands, e.g., CPU and Memory, ProactiveDRS seeks to reorganize the placement of VMs to best balance the current resource demands while taking early actions to accommodate the future/predicted resource demands.
  • Sample actions include, but are not limited to, proactive vMotions (migrations) and proactively powering on a new physical host to accept VMs whose resource demands are expected to spike beyond the available resources of their current physical host.

The VMware Labs folks did not stop there, they are also running a new 2013 Fling Contest and if you are at VMworld, you can drop by the VMware R&D Innovation booth which is behind the main VMware booth to submit your ideas. Another lucky winner will be selected and their idea will also be built by VMware Engineers which includes a free ticket to VMworld 2014. I recommend you either drop by the booth if you are at VMworld or go online to submit an idea and you could be the next person with their very own Fling!

Categories // Uncategorized Tags // drs, Fling, innovation, vcops, vmware

How to Run VMware's New Fling VisualEsxtop on Mac OS X

07.02.2013 by William Lam // 12 Comments

The folks over at VMware Labs continue to pump out awesome new Flings and just yesterday, they released another one called VistualEsxtop, which is an enhanced version of esxtop and resxtop. It is no surprise, the Fling was developed by VMware Engineers working in the Performance group such as Priya Sethuraman, Zhelong Pan, Haiping Yang and Joanna Guan, some of which who helped develop the original esxtop utility.

VisualEsxtop can connect to directly to an ESX(i) host or a vCenter Server and provides support going all the way back to ESXi 3.5 or vCenter Server 4.0. Here is a summary of all the features for VisualEsxtop:

Features

  1. Live connection to ESX host or vCenter Server
  2. Flexible way of batch output
  3. Load batch output and replay them
  4. Multiple windows to display different data at the same time
  5. Line chart for selected performance counters
  6. Flexible counter selection and filtering
  7. Embedded tooltip for counter description
  8. Color coding for important counters

While reading the instructions, I noticed VisualEsxtop is supported on both Windows and Linux and is loaded by a simple .bat or .sh script. So I wondered if it could run on Mac OS X? Well, it turns out the script uses a utility called readlink which does not operate the same on Mac OS X and will thrown an error. However, since VisualEsxtop is just a Java application, you can manually load the VisualEsxtop and the necessary library files.

To do so, you just need to change into the visaulEsxtop directory and run the following command:

java -cp lib/vtop-ui.jar com.vmware.vtop.VTopMain

Note: For ease of use, you can even create a shell script which executes the command so you do not have to type it out each time.

You should now see visualEsxtop launch after executing the above command:

One really cool feature of VisualEsxtop is the use of color coating for important counters and issues. In the screenshot below, you can see I have a VM that is dropping packets and it is automatically highlighted for me.

I would highly recommend you check out VisualEsxtop and add this to your toolbelt of tools for troubleshooting and diagnosing performance issues in a vSphere environment! If you have any feedback or questions for the engineers, please leave them in the comment section of the VisualEsxtop Fling.

Categories // Uncategorized Tags // esxtop, Fling, osx, resxtop, visual esxtop

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • …
  • 9
  • 10
  • 11
  • 12
  • Next Page »

Search

Thank Author

Author

William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

Connect

  • Bluesky
  • Email
  • GitHub
  • LinkedIn
  • Mastodon
  • Reddit
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • Vimeo

Recent

  • VCF 9.0 Hardware Considerations 05/30/2025
  • VMware Flings is now available in Free Downloads of Broadcom Support Portal (BSP) 05/19/2025
  • VMUG Connect 2025 - Minimal VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.x in a Box  05/15/2025
  • Programmatically accessing the Broadcom Compatibility Guide (BCG) 05/06/2025
  • Quick Tip - Validating Broadcom Download Token  05/01/2025

Advertisment

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy

Copyright WilliamLam.com © 2025

 

Loading Comments...