Eric Sloof

VMware Horizon View helps you simplify desktop and application management while increasing security and control. This book will introduce you to all of the components of the VMware Horizon View suite, walk you through their deployment, and show how they are used. We will also discuss how to assess your virtual desktop resource requirements, and build an optimized virtual desktop.

"Implementing VMware Horizon View 5.2" will provide you the information needed to deploy and administer your own end-user computing infrastructure. This includes not only the View components themselves, but key topics such as assessing virtual desktop resource needs, and how to optimize your virtual desktop master image.

You will learn how to design and deploy a performant, flexible and powerful desktop virtualization solution using VMware Horizon View. You will implement important components and features, such as VMware View Connection Server, VMware View Composer, VMware View Transfer Server, and VMware View Security Server.

Implementing VMware Horizon View 5.2 will take you through application virtualization with VMware ThinApp, the implementation of Persona Management, and creation of Desktop Pools. We then cover View Client options, Desktop maintenance, and Virtual Desktop Master Image. Finally we discuss View SSL certificates management, Group Policies, PowerCLI, and VMware View Design and Maintenance to help you get the most out of VMware View.

If you want to learn how to design, implement and administrate a complex, optimized desktop virtualization solution with VMware View, then this book is for you.

VisualEsxtop is an enhanced version of resxtop and esxtop. VisualEsxtop can connect to VMware vCenter Server or ESX hosts, and display ESX server stats with a better user interface and more advanced features.

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

Download VisualEsxtop

Use "java -cp lib/vtop-ui.jar com.vmware.vtop.VTopMain"  for a MacBookPro thanks to William Lam

Steve Muir - Director - VMware Academic Program: Happy first birthday to the VMware Technical Journal! We are very pleased to have seen such a positive reception to the first couple of issues of the journal, and hope you will find this one equally interesting and informative. We will publish the journal twice per year going forward, with a Spring edition that highlights ongoing R&D initiatives at VMware and the Fall edition providing a showcase for our interns and collaborators.

Integration of Log Insight with the vCenter Operations Management platform extends operational visibility and proactive management capabilities across infrastructure and applications in a dynamic, hybrid cloud environment.  Integration also helps you maximize ROI and value by bringing unstructured data (such as syslog files) together with structured data (such as metrics and key performance indicators), offering a significantly enhanced solution for end-to-end operations management.

Although vCenter Log Insight can be used as a standalone log consolidation and analysis tool, it’s greatest strength (and biggest differentiator) is its tight integration with vCenter Server, vSphere, and vCenter Operations Manager. No other virtualization-management tool can give you such a complete view of your data center operations by correlating virtualization performance events and system log entries across the vSphere infrastructure.


Another of vCenter Log Insight’s great strengths is that it can also manage physical servers, storage, and network devices. vCenter Log Insight is extensible, because you can add third-party content packs (made up of numerous fields) or your own content packs.Both large enterprises and small and midsized businesses (SMBs) should use vCenter Log Insight to consolidate their log data to gain strong analytics and troubleshooting capabilities. 

VMware vCenter Log Insight is useful for monitoring, troubleshooting and securing your data center, and it’s quick to set up and enjoyable to use. In addition, vCenter Log Insight offers unique integration with vCenter Operations Manager to give you a complete view of your virtual infrastructure.

This release introduces new performance report pack. By default, reports now include operations status report for line of business virtual machines, alert and performance trend, cluster utilization trend, average and peak virtual machine storage latency. With these reports you can get a consolidated operational status for a group of virtual machines and identify the clusters, datastores, or virtual machines have had performance problems. You can assess any impact to performance in terms of performance or health degradation, as well as determine which datastores had performance problems for the given time and identify the impacted virtual machines from a given datastore. For more information about the new performance reports, see the topic "Reporting Tools in vCenter Operations Manager" in the VMware vCenter Operations Manager Online Help.

vCenter Operations Manager is enhanced to offer in-context application launch capability. Using this feature, you can configure a button or menu item to launch an external application using a URL in a specific context defined by the active UI element and selected object. For example, you can add an "Open in" drop-down menu that launches the vCenter Web user interface, navigating to the details of a selected virtual machine. In the same menu, there might be other items that launch into Hyperic or Log Insight for the same virtual machine.

This release introduces integration with vCenter Log Insight (GA available in Q3 2013) and vCenter Operations Manager. Log Insight can be configured to send alerts to vCenter Operations Manager about vCenter Server objects. In the vSphere UI, vCenter Operations displays links to launch Log Insight in-context from the alerts details page and from the objects details page.

The vSphere group in the Dashboards menu contains several default dashboards for managing virtual objects in a vSphere environment. These default dashboards are available to all members of the Administrators, Operators, and Users user groups. This release introduces the following default vSphere dashboards:

• Troubleshooting Dashboard
• VM Utilization Dashboard
• VM Performance Dashboard
• Host Utilization Dashboard
• Cluster Utilization Dashboard
• Datastore Performance Dashboard
• Datastore Space Dashboard
• Heatmaps Dashboard
• Alerts Dashboard
• Host Memory Dashboard

This video will show you some of the new features and how to upgrade to version 5.7.1. This procedure is applicable when updating to vCenter Operations Manager 5.7.1 vApp from the following product versions. vCenter Operations Manager 5.0, 5.0.1, 5.0.2, 5.0.3, 5.6, and 5.7.1, including any Hotfix versions.

The Rough Cuts service from VMware Press gives you exclusive access to an evolving manuscript that you can read online or download as a PDF and print. A Rough Cuts book is not fully edited or completely formatted, but you'll get access to new versions as they are created.

The Virtual Appliance offers the full functionality of hardware load balancers:

• High Availability
• Full Layer 4/7 Server Load Balancing
• Supports unlimited Virtual & Real Servers
• Web-based GUI
• HTTP Cookie Persistence
• RDP Cookie Persistence
• SSL Offloading
• 802.1q VLANs
• 802.3ad Bonding
• Feedback Agent
• Stateful Packet Inspection
• Full IPv6 Support
• SIP Support with Call-ID Persistence
• Full System root Access

This paper presents best practices and performance data for VMware Horizon View 5.2 and also highlighted some of the new features. With optimized PCoIP image caching, a bandwidth improvement of up to 10% is seen across different network conditions. The other PCoIP improvements included dynamic GPO settings and the support of relative mouse.

Windows 8 optimizations are also presented which can provide up to 60% bandwidth savings. There were also performance improvements in the View management side where up to 2x improvement is seen for various administrative operations such as provisioning, recompose, and rebalancing.

Furthermore, with new SESparse disk, administrator can minimize storage overhead by efficiently using and reclaiming storage-space to minimize the storage capacity requirements for persistent desktops and decreases the need to continuously recompose and restore images. 


For the vSGA feature, the results illustrated the ability of VMware’s hardware-backed 3D support to scale efficiently and it was illustrated that for light 3D workloads, a 2-socket x86 server with 2 GPUs can support over 100 3D desktops.

This clearly showed the benefits of GPU virtualization and the strength of VMware’s 3D strategy where VMs over-and-above those that can be supported by the GPUs seamlessly use VMware’s software renderer. Finally, best practices for optimizing the parent template, for optimizing PCoIP for different network conditions, and for the vSGA feature were presented.

Technical White Paper - VMware Horizon View 5.2 Performance and Best Practices