vRanger Error

Ran across this error on a client running vRanger:

Message: Failure creating VM datastore lock Host: ESXHostNameha-host VM: MVName

After investigating, the root of the issue was that the ESX host had run out of memory - there were too many VMs running on this host. This was keeping the VMs from quiescing long enough to get a good snapshot. When they would try, the memory would spike and balloon all over the board. After thinning out some memory, the problem disappeared.

This particular client is growing faster than they were paying attention to, hence the increase in memory utilization across the board.The client is ordering more memory for all the hosts in their cluster and looking at ordering another host or two so that they can get back to N+1 (where they actually started at).

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Dustin Shaw
VCP
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Here's some books that should help out:
VMware vSphere 4 Administration Instant Reference
VMware Fusion 3
VMware Cookbook: A Real-World Guide to Effective VMware Use

View Pool Options: Reset, Recompose, Rebalance, Refresh

Thought I'd give a quick note on the different options that you have in a View pool, and a breakdown to what they do:

Reset:
Reset the VM that you are on.

Recompose:
Allows you to change the snapshot either within the same base VM or select another base VM and snapshot. This new replica image will be pushed out to all the linked clones in the pool.

Rebalance:
Rebalances all the linked clones to use the available space on the LUNs efficiently

Refresh:
Take the linked clone back to the same image as the original image. If there is a persistent data disk, that will be kept, but everything on the "C:" disk will go back to where it was.

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Dustin Shaw
VCP
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Here's some books that should help out:
Mastering VMware vSphere 4 (Computer/Tech)
VMware Cookbook: A Real-World Guide to Effective VMware Use

Office 2010 ThinApp

So I've been struggling in my spare time to get Office 2010 ThinApped on Windows 7, and here's what I found:

You can't do it yet.

Found a forum here talking about it. You can get it on XP (I don't care about XP right now in my test View environment), but not Win 7.

The issue is that you run into a licensing error when you deploy, because of the way that MS has changed licensing for Office 2010.

So as of right now there are two solutions for my View environment - require everyone to be on 2010 (include it in the base image) or make 2 base images, and move people over as possible.

Either way a pain, but whatever works.

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Dustin Shaw
VCP
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Here's some books that should help out:
VMware vSphere 4 Administration Instant Reference
VCP VMware Certified Professional on vSphere 4 Study Guide: Exam VCP-410

vRanger Error

Here's a random vRanger Error:

Message: An internal error occurred during execution, please contact Vizioncore support if the error persists.  Error Message: VM's host could not be identified

Got this on one of my client's install's today. vRanger 4.x.

The solution? Go refresh the inventory. Go edit your backup job and keep all the same settings.

Easy fix.

-Update-

I ran into the error again on vRanger 5.3.x, and posted an update here.

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Dustin Shaw
VCP

ThinApp "Error: GetFileAttributes"

I was ThinApping Office 2010, and ran into the following error:

"Error: GetFileAttributes for file <filename> failed?

I poked around, but didn't find much on the internet for it, so I thought I'd post the solution.

The problem is that the path is too long. I believe the limit for the path and filename are 256 characters. In this case it was 263 characters:

\\server-name.domain.local\ThinApp\Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010\%SystemRoot%\assembly\GAC_MSIL\Microsoft.VisualStudio.Tools.Applications.ServerDocument.v10.0\10.0.0.0__b03f5f7f11d50a3a\Microsoft.VisualStudio.Tools.Applications.ServerDocument.v10.0.dll

I shortened the path (renamed the directory to Office2010ProPlus), and it worked perfect.

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Dustin Shaw
VCP
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Here's some books that should help out:
Virtualization 100 Success Secrets 100 Most asked questions on Server and Desktop Virtualization, Thinapp Software, SAN, Windows and Vista Applications
Mastering VMware vSphere 4 (Computer/Tech)
Portable Application: Portable Application Creators, Application Virtualization, List of Portable Software, VMware ThinApp, RUNZ

ThinApp Office 2010

Found a good post for how to ThinApp Office 2010:
http://blogs.vmware.com/thinapp/2009/12/microsoft-office-2010-beta-recipes.html

Make sure you download the office2010-1.vbs script and put it in the root of your ThinApp project for everything to work right.

UPDATE 3/24/11:

I was reviewing my traffic, and noticed that this page still gets a lot of traffic.

For everyone that stumbles across it, I thought I'd point out that as of today, Office 2010 still shouldn't be ThinApped in a production environment. From my experience and testing, it looks like it will run for around 30 days, then it will time out looking for activation.

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Dustin Shaw
VCP
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View 4.5 is Alive!

So I finally had to make time to put in View 4.5 on my 2 test Datacenters (one is a Demo environment, the other for play).

Went in like a breeze on both. Run the installer for View Manager, update the View Composer, and boom. I'm up to 4.5.

The only real issue I ran into was with my existing XP Linked Clone pool on my test Datacenter (the Demo datacenter was fine...). I went in and removed and re-added the View Agent and updated my Snap and pointed the Pool to it. No joy. I got a blank screen.

Did some research, and saw some notes about ESX 4.0u2 with View 4.0 causing this issue, so I thought I'd start there.
Here's two links I found:
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1016753
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1022830

Besides, I felt like updating the datacenters to ESX 4.1 anyway, since I had held off because View 4.0 doesn't like ESX 4.1.

So I went through and upgraded vCenter, vCenter Update Manger, then used Update Manager to update my hosts. If you've not used Update Manager for it, you should - it's cool to watch. Apply your baseline with 4.1, tell it to remediate, and sit back and enjoy. That is, assuming of course, that all of your vms can migrate on their own (aka, you don't have them attached to CD drives, etc).

So once I had them updated, I once again updated my vmTools on the XP image, removed and readded the View Agent for good measure, then updated my Snap and Linked Clones. Still no joy.

So I though, ok, maybe something is wrong with my pool.

I created a new desktop pool (based off the same Snap) and it worked!

Since these were just Demo/Test datacenters, I just blew away my old pools and created new ones. If this was a live environment, then I'd have to worry about keeping the persistent disks and reattaching them.

After XP was successful, I built myself a Win 7 image, created a pool off of it, and awesome! It works great.

I love the dual monitors! I have two different resolution monitors at home, and two different aspect ratio monitors at work, so I can now take full advantage of them with View 4.5.

Now I'm going to proceed with testing out the ThinApp stuff integrated into View 4.5, and some performance testing, but so far it all looks awesome!

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Dustin Shaw
VCP
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Here's some books that should help out: