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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

Running ESXi 5.5/5.5u1 on Apple Mac Mini + Thunderbolt Ethernet Adapter Caveat

09.03.2013 by William Lam // 160 Comments

I just upgraded my Apple Mac Mini 5,3 this morning from ESXi 5.1 Update 1 to the latest ESXi 5.5 release and I am very happy to report the upgrade worked flawlessly! When ESXi 5.5 is generally available, you will be able to just download the ISO and install or upgrade your existing Mac Mini without requiring additional drivers for the on-board network adapter to function correctly. If you have a Mac Mini 6,2 the old SMC issue has been resolved, but the PSOD issue is still occurring. As promised to some folks on Twitter, here is a custom ESXi 5.5 ISO for Mini 6,2 that you can just download and install without any manual intervention:

  • Download: ESXi-5.5-Mac-Mini-6.2.iso
  • Download: ESXi-5.5u1-Mac-Mini-6.2.iso

The only issue that I found is if you are using the Apple Thunderbolt Ethernet Adapter, you will find that after the install/upgrade, the network adapter no longer shows up. Looking into this issue, it looks like with the release of ESXi 5.5 and the introduction of the new Native Driver architecture, it had a slight impact to the Thunderbolt Ethernet Adapter. Having said that, the Apple Thunderbolt Ethernet Adapter and Mac Mini was never officially supported, so we were actually lucky that it had worked in the first place.

The reason the Thunderbolt Ethernet Adapter is not being recognized is that its device ID (14e4:1682) is not in tg3 (Broadcom) map file /etc/vmware/driver.map.d/tg3.map. If the device was officially supported, then it would have been automatically claimed by the vmkdevmgr which handles both vmklinux and Native Driver devices. The fix is actually quite simple and I have created a custom VIB called vghetto-apple-thunderbolder-ethernet.vib which will add the appriorpiate device ID to a new custom map file called /etc/vmware/driver.map.d/apple.map which will not collide with the existing tg3.map file. The reason for needing a custom VIB versus appending the device ID to something like /etc/rc.local.d/local.sh is that when the script runs it is too late from a networking stack point of view.

To install the custom VIB, you will need to upload it to your ESXi datastore and run the following command:

esxcli software vib install -v /vmfs/volumes/[DATASTORE]/vghetto-apple-thunderbolder-ethernet.vib -f

Now you can either use the vSphere Web/C# Client to verify the Thunderbolt Ethernet Adapter is showing up or you can run esxcli network nic list.

Categories // Uncategorized Tags // apple, ESXi 5.5, mac mini, tg3, thunderbolt, vSphere 5.5

Installing ESXi 5.1 Update 1 on Mac Mini is Now a Breeze! (No Custom ISO/patches Needed!)

04.26.2013 by William Lam // 68 Comments

ESXi 5.1 Update 1 was just released by VMware and similar to the ESXi 5.0 Update 2 release last year, the tg3 (Broadcom) driver has now been updated to 3.123b.v50.1 which is required to support network connectivity on the Apple Mac Mini's. Prior to this, to install ESXi on an Apple Mac Mini, users were required to build a custom ISO that included the updated tg3 driver and I am happy to say this is no long necessary! In addition, having the latest driver also provides out of the box support for the Thunderbolt ethernet adapter which is great if you are looking to add an additional ethernet connection to the Apple Mac Mini.

Disclaimer: The Apple Mac Mini is not officially supported by VMware.

Here is a quick screenshot of the networking details including the Thunderbolt ethernet adapter on my Apple Mac Mini 5,3 running ESXi 5.1 Update 1:

Apple Mac Mini 6,2 Users

If you have an Apple Mac Mini 6,2 the workarounds described in this article are still required as well as an additional issue regarding the on-board NIC for the Apple Mac Mini 6,2. The issue is that the on-board NIC is not recognized and claimed by the tg3 driver because there is not a PCI ID entry in the tg3 map file. Note, BCM57766 driver is supported, just that it was missing the mapping (I believe this was the case in 5.0 as well). Working with VMware engineering, I was able to obtain the SMC fix and along with the workarounds that I built earlier for ESXi 5.0 and I have created a custom ESXi 5.1 Update 1 ISO that includes all the fixes and you will be able to install it on your Apple Mac Mini 6,2 without any further modifications.

Download: ESXi-5.1u1-MacMini-SMC-BOOT-FIX-6-2.iso

Note: From my understanding, some of these issues have been fixed but just did not make it in time for the Update 1 release. I'm hoping that we will be able to get most of these fixed in a future patch or update. This is actually pretty awesome, given that this is NOT SUPPORTED by VMware, but engineers are still willing to help the community out!

UPDATE: When trying to enable vSphere HA, the following error "Could not find a trusted signer" is thrown. To get around this problem, you will need to manually install the vSphere HA VIB and then reconfigure vSphere HA. The easiest method is to SCP the VIB from the VCSA and then using ESXCLI and the --no-sig-check flag to install the VIB.

Here are the commands to run:

scp /etc/vmware-vpx/docRoot/vSphere-HA-depot/vib20/vmware-fdm/VMware_bootbank_vmware-fdm_5.1.0-1064983.vib [email protected]:/tmp
esxcli software vib install -v /tmp/VMware_bootbank_vmware-fdm_5.1.0-1064983.vib --no-sig-check

Additional Resources:

  • Resource page for all things VMware and Apple

Categories // Uncategorized Tags // ESXi 5.0, mac, mac mini, notsupported, osx, tg3, thunderbolt, update 1

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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.

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