So VMware Horizon 6.2 was announced at VMworld just a week ago and the one feature I sorely wanted to see was automated provisioning (golden image management) of a Microsoft Remote Desktop Services farm.

The provisioning process is fairly straight forward, so in this blog post I’ll walk you through the steps to avoid any issues.

Prerequisites:

• Download the Agent, Connection Server and Composer software.
• Upgrade your Connection Servers to 6.2.
• Upgrade your Security Servers to 6.2 (remember you’ll need to repair with the connection servers).
• Upgrade your Composer.
• A Microsoft RDS server.

Once the upgrade is complete of the core infrastructure, lets hop to the Customisation Specification.

Creating a Customisation Specification:

So I originally missed this step completely and was left red faced after hours of troubleshooting and pestering some names in VMware (Sorry Ben, Pat, I’ll RTFM next time!).

I’m going to do this demo in the “God Awful” web client, but its the same in the GUI Console anyway.

Open the web console, and select Policies:

Select Customisation Specification > new:

Select Windows, Create a Logical name and description, then click next:

 Enter some organisational specific info, or not, who cares, click next:

On the Computer name Tab, for the sake of convenience, choose “use the virtual machine name”, click next:

Enter a product key if you wish, or rely on KMS, click next:

Enter the local administrators password for after the sysprep, then click Next:

• Select the relevant timezone, click next:
• Do not configure a “run once”, click next:
• Select which ever networking method you like, DHCP is probably easier,click next.
• Enter the domain name and credentials to domain join. Then Click Next:

Ensure to select “Generate New Security ID” then click Next:

Click finish on the Final page and ensure your new template shows (mine disappeared the first time, sneaky so and so):

Preparing the target:

Now lets hop first to the Remote Desktop Services target and install / upgrade the agent software!

Select the agent on the RDS server and kick off the installer:

Select Next, Agree to the license, choose IPV4, IPV6 if you’re crazy and click Next:

On the next screen, ensure to enable the “VMware Horizon View Composer Agent” and select Next:

after that, finish the install. Restart once, Shutdown and snapshot the VM.

Onwards!

Creating the Automated Farm:

Open the Horizon console and head to Resources > Farms > Add:

Select Automated Farm and click Next:

Select the vSphere server, select  Next:

Enter the Farm Name, click Next:

Enter the naming pattern for the farm servers, select Next:

Enter your Vsan details if you opted in to that sort of thing, click Next:

On the vCenter settings, choose the VM we configured in the target section earlier, select OK:

On the SnapShot selection, choose the Snapshot we created and click OK:

After that, just select whatever you want and click Next:

On the storage selection, choose your own settings then click Next:

Select The guest settings, including the Specification we created earlier:

Once finished, simply click finish and pray you’ve gotten everything right:

And that’s it! go have a coffee and check to ensure you have a VM after the deployment:

Now to create a pool:

Select catalog > Desktop Pools > Add:

Choose RDS Desktop Pool, Select Next:

• Name the Pool something useful, then select Next:
• Set the Pool settings, then select Next:

Select the newly created farm, then select Next:

Select “Entitle users after this wizard finishes” then select Finish:

Click Add, enter the group you wish and click OK once selected:

Click Close:

Now open the horizon client, tada!

To recap, below you will find the previous articles:

• ThinIO facts and figures, Part 1: VDI and Ram caching.
• ThinIO facts and figures, Part 2: The Bootstorm chestnut.

Off topic note:

two years ago at an E2EVC event, the concept behind ThinIO was born with just a mad scientist idea amongst peers.

If you are lucky enough to be attending E2EVC this weekend, David and I will be there presenting ThinIO and maybe, just maybe there will be an announcement. Our session is on Saturday at 15:30 so pop by, you won’t be disappointed.

Back on topic:

So here’s a really interesting blog post. Remote Desktop Services (XenApp / XenDesktop hosted shared) or whatever you like to call it. RDS really presents a fun caching platform for us, as it allows us to deal with a much higher IO volume and achieve deeper savings.

We’ve really tested the heck out of this platform for how we perform on Microsoft RDS, Horizon View RDS integration and Citrix XenSplitPersonality with Machine Creation Services.

The figures we are sharing today are based on the following configuration and load test:

• Citrix XenDesktop 7.6
• Windows Server 2012 r2
• Citrix User Profile Manager.
• 16gb of Ram.
• 4 vCpu.
• LoginVSI 4.1 medium workload 1 hour test.
• 10 users.
• VMFS 5 volume.

Fun figures!

Diving straight in, lets start by looking at the volume of savings across three cache types.

Reviewing the details for a moment:

Running repetitive tests of at least 3 per cache type, we found even at the lowest entry point we would support (50mb per user) we saw phenomenal savings of over 70% on write IO.

No pressure no diamonds!

To put that into perspective, at a 512 MB cache for 10 users, our cache reached maximum capacity at the second user login. With 8 users still left to login, cache full and still an hours worth of load testing left, our ThinIO technology was under serious pressure.

This is key to why ThinIO is such a great solution. We won’t just perform great until we fill our cache, we don’t require architecture changes or care about your storage type, we have no lead times or install days, we will carry on to work with what is available to use, to take a large ammount of pressure off storage IOPS and data throughput.

With the figures above, you can see just how well the intelligence behind our cache can scale even when it faces such a steep workload.

Below you will find a breakdown of each test:

512 MB cache:

Breaking down into the figures, on the 512mb cache test, it’s clear to see just how well ThinIO deals with the tiniest of caches:

When we side by side this with our baseline averages, you can see we take a huge chunk out of that Spiky login pattern and continue to  reduce the steady state IO as the test continues:

So lets move up and see how we get on!

1024 mb cache:

Doubling up our cache size we see a great increase in both read and write savings as you’d expect.

With 100mb of cache per user, and the average user profile in the test 3 times that size. We are still under pressure. As we will natively favour optimisations to write IO over read, you’ll see the bulk of improvements happen in write when we’re under pressure as illustrated in this test:

With more cache available during the peak IO point, we make further savings on write:

2048 mb cache:

and at our recommended value of 200mb per user in Remote Desktop Services, the results are phenomenal! With this size, even still below the 300mb mark per user profile, the read IO gets a really good boost and the write IO saving well over the 95% mark!

And the side by side comparison is every bit as good as the savings illustrated above, reducing that peak bursty IO to just 41 IOPS:

But there’s more! 

As i pointed out in the previous blog, IOPS are just one side of the story. A reduction of data throughput to the disk is also a big benefit when it comes to storage optimisation, and as you can see we make a big difference:

Wrap up:

So there you have it, with ThinIO, a simple, in VM solution, you can you seriously reduce your IO footprint, boost user performance and achieve greater storage density per virtual machine or on Remote Desktop Services technology.

In the mean time:

If you would like a chance to test ThinIO pre-release, find access to the public beta below. Thank you for your time and happy testing!

Test, test, review and tune. Rinse and repeat!

We’ve spent months load testing, tuning, fixing and retesting ThinIO. And for the first time we’re going to start talking about the dramatic results ThinIO can have on storage scalability and user perceived performance.

During our extensive testing cycles, we’ve covered:

• Horizon View
• Citrix XenDesktop
• Microsoft RDS

We’ve been seeing very similar, if not identical results when testing against pools on the following storage types too:

• XenServer SR
• VMFS
• NFS
• Microsoft Clustered Shared Volumes

For reference the statistics we’re sharing today are based on VDI via VMware Horizon View 6, these figures are averages across at least three independent tests. All details of the tests that exported these results are covered below.

Testing details:

The VM’s we tested in this particular workload are as follows:

• Testing Method: Login VSI 4.1 Medium Workload
• Operating System: Windows 7 x64 SP1
• System ram: 3gb
• vCPU: 2
• ThinIO cache: 350mb
• Technology:  VMware Horizon View 6
• Test runtime: 1 hour*
• Statistic sample period: 5 seconds.

With that out of the way, lets jump right in!

Storage IO:

The number of IO’s per second is crucially important when dealing with storage; many, many small IO’s sent to sparse locations on disk are a killer to storage technologies, only made worse by certain file systems.

As a storage acceleration and negation technology, were extremely happy with the IO’s reduction we see on the storage:

Even with just 350 MB of ram as a cache, we achieve phenomenal IO reduction.

Storage MB / Sec:

But IO’s are just one part of the puzzle, what about the size of the data requests being sent to the storage?

A true solution to take the pressure off the SAN, improve user performance, and increase storage density needs to tackle both the IO and the throughput problem.

As you can see above, with just 350mb we’re very good at it!

Side by Side Comparison:

So rounded figures are fine so long as the data is trustworthy, but here’s a real preview laid bare for your analysis.

Here’s a direct comparison on NFS and VMFS of taking a standard load test IO pattern and comparing it to an identical test with ThinIO installed in the VM:

VMFS:

NFS:

As you can imagine, we’re extremely proud of what we can achieve with as little as 350mb per desktop.

The beauty of our approach is simplicity, your users can see this benefit not in a matter of weeks, days or even hours. ThinIO can be up and running in minutes, delivering reduced login times, storage acceleration and providing a far deeper density on your current storage.

Wrap up:

So there you have it, we’ll be adding additional blog posts in the coming days looking at Remote Desktop Services / XenApp, intelligent cache management built in and our Read Ahead technology, so check back. In the mean time, if you would like a chance to test ThinIO pre-release, find access to the public beta below. Thank you for your time and happy testing!

* Eight-hour figures and complete statistics are also available, we have nothing to hide and we’d encourage you to get in touch with the ThinScale team and we’ll share them with you.

Warm up your labs or fire up your golden images ladies and gents, we’re delighted to announce ThinIO’s brief public beta will begin today!

This project has taught us some really interesting things about Windows IO, how Windows behaves and how the hypervisor and storage can behave. This project really felt like a David vs. Goliath task as we (members of our community with a desire to simplify this issue) attempted to tackle one of the largest issues in our industry, storage bottlenecks and Windows desktops.

What’s really unique about our approach is there are no hardware lead times, no architecture changes needed and no external dependencies. ThinIO can be installed in seconds and the benefits are seen immediately.

We’ve spent countless hours testing, tuning, retesting and even more tuning. We’re extremely happy with the results. This public beta will serve as an opportunity for you to really kick the tyres and believe the hype in what we’ve built while we’re putting together the final touches to release the product in the coming weeks.

During this time, we found achieving positive and consistent IO negation boils down to a number of items:

• cutting down on the volume of IOPS sent to the storage.
• Reducing the data transferred (MB/sec) to and from the storage.
• Intelligently cutting down on peak IO, such as boot and user logon.

In the coming days we’re going drill down into these categories in more depth. But as a quick overview, here’s a baseline (top) and ThinIO (bottom) session comparison of a Windows 8.1 desktop login, 1 hour Login VSI medium workload and log off with just 350 mb of cache for ThinIO:

Keep an eye out for the coming blog posts, but in the mean time, the ThinIO beta is available to download here now! Go forth and have fun.

Until next time,

A

I wrote a tool quite some time ago called watcher2 while troubleshooting a similar issue. I finally took the time to refactor that tool for use with XenApp 6.5 , XenDesktop and VMware View and they are finally available to download! Both watcher utilities also include a latency counter which was a request that came in over and over.

HDX and PCOIP watcher by default dock to the top of the screen and can be moved left or right as below:

They can now also be completely un docked:

How do they work?

The tool finds your username in the performance monitor counters for session bandwidth, once it finds this entry it reads your performance monitor data once every second and reports on it.

In the case of PCOIP watcher, it reads the PCOIP counters from performance monitor.

what do the values mean?

All values are in either Kilobits per second or Megabits per second.

In = Traffic from the client to the virtual, this may spike during large copy / paste jobs,web cams or copying data from a usb key to the session:
Out = Traffic from the virtual desktop to the client, mainly audio or video traffic causes this to spike.
Latency = The delay between your client and the virtual desktop.

Can I Configure it?

Two thresholds are available, a yellow warning and a red warning, currently . These default values can be written to:

“HKEY_local_machine\software\ThinScaleTech\HDXmonitor”
“HKEY_current_user\software\ThinScaleTech\HDXmonitor”

Dword: YellowWarning = 300 (decimal)

Dword: RedWarning = 600 (decimal)

Do they have any dependencies?

.net framework 3.5

if you are running XenApp 6.5 or XenDesktop 5.6, ensure you have the latest hot-fixes installed or the counters may be incorrect.

How do I launch it?

Allow the user to run it manually, or place the executable in their start-up folder or login script.

Where Can I download it?

Here:

What’s coming next:

• Native Microsoft RDP Counters.
• Realtime graphs and recording.
• source code is available on request.

Everyone having a Good Citrix Synergy week? Some great new products announced! Ready for more announcements?

Great!

After 5 months of coffee, tears of frustration and hair pulling we’re absolutely delighted, thrilled and relieved to announce ThinKiosk 4.0 is nearly ready. Complete with my new partner in crime Remko Weijnen (I’ve been saying ‘we’ for ages, now you know who… awesome eh?) we’ve worked some long nights to get this version out the door.

With that out of the way, we’re proud to announce some of the new features coming in 4.0. Bear in mind this is just a preview, the final features and details of the product are still being hammered out, but below is a taster of some of the functionality you can expect to see shortly.

Back to the drawing board:

ThinKiosk 4.0 is a complete rewrite and refactor of ThinKiosk. It’s built on the 4.0 .Net framework which has brought a lot of simplicity and new features to our tool-set. ThinKiosk 4.0 was built with three main aims:

• Enterprise Ready.
• Fool Proof.
• Secure by Design.

With ThinKiosk 4.0, your setup time will go from days to minutes. Out of the box, ThinKiosk is ready for the following technologies without any local machine tuning:

• Citrix XenDesktop / XenApp.
• Citrix VDI in a Box.
• VMware View.
• Microsoft Remote Desktop Services.

For the exact details of each of these optimizations, follow the subsequent blog posts / documentation.

New Look and Feel:

Without further ado, lets start with the new look and feel:

ThinKiosk 4.0 has also been built on the industry leading graphical interface DevExpress giving us a really shiny, professional and sleek interface. Finally giving us an Interface we can be proud to put on your desktops.

ThinKiosk’s interface has been further improved giving you an Applications tab for Publishing desktops for VMware View, Microsoft Remote Desktop services or Citrix Desktops via ICA file or local applications.

This Applications tab has been modelled after the windows 8 Metro err, I mean Windows 8 UI. This provides a similar look and feel to the new Windows start menu and it really breathes new life into old hardware. With this tab, you can publish shortcuts to VDI Desktops or local applications making it a one stop shop for applications.

You can flick from one tab to another easily, or disable the one you do not wish to use.

It’s all about the customization!

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder right? Agreed!

Themes:

 ThinKiosk 4.0 will ship with over 8 themes and wallpapers, customization of the splash screen, buttons… everything!

The Applications tab can also be completely customized to your tastes:

Lock down:

As with Previous versions of ThinKiosk, every button and object in ThinKiosk can be locked down to exactly what you wish, for example here’s a stripped back browser session:

Or a stripped back application window:

Anyway… Enough about the appearance, Lets talk tech!

Introducing the new ThinKiosk Broker Service and Management console:

The ThinKiosk Broker, Management Console and ThinKiosk clients use an all new ThinKiosk TCP protocol (I never ever, ever want to see a tcp socket again for as long as I live, writing this protocol was a killer!) to allow you to centrally manage, catalog and report on your ThinKiosk devices. The protocol is lightening fast and secure by design.

This new framework will form a long blog post itself, but some quick fire information is below:

• Complete off domain management.
• Auto device registration, just point ThinKiosk at the broker and it will check in and download the default profile.
• Remote Control / Shadowing of end point devices via the console.
• Device Grouping for profiling multiple devices or creating an organisation structure.
• Remote actions (power off, restart, update).
• Device Reporting.
• No Enterprise database software necessary.
• Audit logging.

Unlike other Thin Client protocols and software, ThinKiosk does not accept any inbound connections, in user or system context. Removing the ability to hijack thin clients… which is all too possible with certain vendors!

The console is simple, and quick to navigate:

Installation of the broker takes roughly 5 minutes and is ready to serve your Devices as soon as you configure the default profile.

New Profile Handler:

The ThinKiosk client has received an overhaul and with it we’ve streamlined the profile. ThinKiosk no longer requires group policies or the clunky offline config tool, we have a new profile system based on XML files with a fitting profile editor to match:

No more configuring 5 group policies for one url, the new policy manager is clean, self explanatory, full of new functionality and uses the same interface whether you are using the ThinKiosk management console or modifying the local profile.

If you want to still use group policy to deploy configuration? No problem! just drop the file on the client via group policy preferences!

And the Client!

Lets talk about the 4.0 client.

Supported platforms:

Windows XP – Windows 8

Browser Ahoy!

ThinKiosk is now a fully fledged browser, complete with address bar. If you want to allow your users to browse around, now you can.

Browser improvements:

The ThinKiosk 4.0 browser will:

• Supress scripting errors.
• Allow you to add your sites to the trusted sites via policy.
• Auto tunes the browser for VDI portals.
• Auto circumvent silly SSL untrusted or mismatched errors (great for POC’s *cough* VDI in a Box *cough*)
• ThinKiosk now runs as an Internet explorer executable. No more flicking between iexplore.exe and thinkiosk.exe.

VDI Improvements:

Now to the nuts and bolts!

Local login pass through:

Now that you have the ability to add direct VDI connections. ThinKiosk will handle the log in experience and pass the credentials to the responsible technology:

This integration allows ThinKiosk to better manage the desktop experience and provide your users with a single login pane rather than the recurrent login screens you can experience with Microsoft / Citrix file connections.

These connection files can also be auto launched, to remove that pesky click first thing each day.

Citrix Technologies:

• Log off screen redirection for Web interface, storefront and VDI in a box.
• Log off the web portal when a desktop launches for the above platforms.
• Support for Adding ICA file connections.
• Auto configuration of Single sign on from local pc to remote desktop. (Nightmare previously).
• VDI in a Box auto browser tuning for compatibility.
• Optionally disable the Citrix Desktop viewer (CDviewer.exe).

VMware View:

• Support for publishing multiple pool connections
• Support for publishing multiple direct desktop connections.
• Support for PassThrough.
• Disables Certificate checking by default for quick POC’s.
• Pass through ctrl alt del / Windows + l (more on this later).

Microsoft Remote Desktop Services:

• Support for publishing multiple connections.
• Support for 2012 RDS and VDI.
• SSL Certificate warning suppression.
• Support for login once.

Improved local application handling:

ThinKiosk 4.0 has an improved local application engine, When you add an application to the Applications tab, it will automatically pull in the icon window and you can also specify to launch apps but hide them (think run key entries). If ThinKiosk is restarted via admin task, it’s smart enough to know not to relaunch them.

Environment variables for paths and arguments are fully supported and i’ve also added a variable for 32bit program files paths… I always wondered why Microsoft didn’t do this, but I digress.

Windows secure keystroke blocking and passthrough:

You asked… (and asked and asked and asked and asked). It’s done, with ThinKiosk 4.0 you will be able to block CTRL + Alt + Del, [Windows] + [L] etc.

Pass through of these keystrokes to the remote desktop is available for VMware View already and will be coming shortly after 4.0 for Citrix and Microsoft connections.

Group Policy Lockdown:

By default when you install ThinKiosk 4.0, it will arm the PC with the most restrictive policies via the local group policy engine, disabling access to all admin utilities and even local disks. This lockdown can be tuned or turned off via policy if required.

ThinKiosk performs privileged actions via the ThinKiosk Machine service which installs as part of the installation.

Auto log in account:

ThinKiosk will ship with it’s own user account for fast deployment. This account will be created on the local machine and gives you a quick an easy method to manage local accounts on non domain joined PC.

The accounts password is synchronized with the ThinKiosk unlock password you specify.

This account is completely optional and you can turn it off or substitute it with a domain account of your choice.

ThinKiosk will also manage the Windows Shell replacement policy itself via policy, so no more mucking around with local group policy or registry keys.

ThinKiosk also now encrypts the auto login account using LSA.

Active Setup:

With ThinKiosk as shell, you can now run Active Setup with ThinKiosk’s improved Active Setup Async.

Active setup Async is a utility we have implemented into ThinKiosk that will perform active setup 60% faster than standard Microsoft active setup via a threading and queuing engine, the end result is active setup support ( for example: HDX flash redirection) with a much faster (and prettier)  interface.

Start up Script:

ThinKiosk can now implement the local group policy engines start-up script to allow you to manage off domain PC’s. With the start-up script, you can install software, updates, disable services, uninstall software, delete files, profiles… anything!

The only limitation here is your own imagination or scripting abilities.

If the latter is a concern? worry not, we’ll be creating a scripting library where ThinKiosk enthusiasts can share and collaborate on similar tasks.

Local session control:

ThinKiosk 4.0 offers you the ability to control local volume, printers, screen saver and even background color.

Improved debug logging:

ThinKiosk logs everything, every action, command, hiccup… everything.

If something isn’t quite working as expected, chances are the debugging window will announce in triumphant glory exactly what is broken!

Redundant profile management:

ThinKiosk takes a copy of it’s profile on each check in to an FTP server or Broker server.

In the event of the server being offline ThinKiosk attempts five times to connect before failing back to the local profile allowing your users to continue working without an outage.

If the broker server becomes available again throughout the day, ThinKiosk will check back in to allow management but will not disturb the user.

And so much more!

I’m not going to go on and on, but as you can see… It’s awesome!

Check back in a few weeks for the release as we ready the build.

Hopefully I soaked in enough of the course through partial listening while reading the powercli help references to pass my exam today!

Retrieve and Apply DRS recommendations:

get-drsrecommendation | Apply-DrsRecommendation

Find all vm’s with e1000 network cards, for upgrade to vmxnet:

get-vm | Get-NetworkAdapter | where {$_.type -match “e1000″} | select-object parent,networkname,name,type

power off all vm’s with “test” in their names:

get-vm test* | stop-vm -confirm:$false

Move all vm’s with “test” in their names:

get-vm | where {$_.name -like “*test”} | move-vm -destination destinationhostname

Remove all vm’s with “test” in their name:

get-vm test* | remove-vm -confirm:$false

retrieve a list of vm’s with thinly provisioned disks:

get-vm | select HardDisks -expandproperty HardDisks | where {$_.storageformat -match “Thin”} | select-object parent,name,capacitykb,filename

A function to report on physical resources vs virtual commitment:

function get-commitment {
 $objreport=@()

 get-vmhost | % {

 $intvmcommitmemmb=$null
 $intvmcommitcpu=$null

 get-vm -location $_ | % {
 $intvmcommitcpu += $_.numcpu
 $intvmcommitmemmb += $_.MemoryMB
 }#end vm

 $objOutput = New-Object PSObject -Property @{
 VMHost = $_.name
 VMMaxCpu = $_.NumCpu
 VMCommitCPU = $intvmcommitcpu
 VMMaxMem = $_.MemoryTotalMB
 VMCommitMem = $intvmcommitmemmb
 }#end object
 $objreport += $objoutput 
 }#endhost

 return $objreport
}#endfunction

get-commitment

A function to report all machines with snapshots:

function get-snapshots {
 $i=$null 
 $result=@()
 $objAllservers = get-vm
 foreach ($server in $objAllservers){
 $i++
 $intsize = $intsize + $objallservers.length
 Write-Progress -activity "Gathering snapshot report ($server)" -status "Percent complete: " -PercentComplete (($i / $objAllservers.length) * 100)
 $result += get-snapshot $server}

 return $result
}

get-snapshots | select-object name,created,sizemb,iscurrent,vm,vmid,Id,Uid

pass the vcp exam: (work in progress)

get-coursenotes |
select-object salespitch,minimums,maximums,configurationlimitations |
commit-tobrain | out-exampaper