Horizon 7.10: Enabling dynamic codec switching

VMware Horizon 7.10 – released on September 17, 2019 – ships with a new dynamic encoder. Depending on what content you’re watching to in your VDI, it will seamless switch to the best suiting codec for optimal performance/quality-balance. While H.264 is ideal for rapidly changing contents like videos, JPG/PNG offers better quality for more static content like Office applications. Overall: Neat stuff!

As of this release the “switch”-Codec is disabled by default and must be explicitly enabled via registry. Also make sure you’re using Horizon Client 5.2 or later to make the codec work.
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Log Insight: Node unreachable after upgrade from 4.8 to 8.0

The new Log Insight 8.0 release brings some cool new things: The OS of the whole appliance is replaced with Photon OS 3.0 instead of SUSE (in-place update possible!), the Windows agent is being open-sourced and brings various improvements to content packs. To read more you can check out the release notes or the official blog post.

However when I’ve went ahead upgrading my Log Insight instance the upgrade process ran into a timeout. The Web UI as well as SSH were not reachable anymore. The whole node was dead network-wise, while the appliance itself ran just fine. Sherlock’s conclusion: Something went wrong, obviously.Read full article »

vRLI: Change node IP address

vRLI Cluster Settings

How to change the IP address of a VMware vRealize Log Insight node? Glad you asked! I’ve done this change a few weeks earlier to be able to take use of the recommended “Integrated Load Balancer” (in short ILB) while re-using the existing node IP address for the Virtual IP address, mainly for backwards-compatibility reasons like already deployed agents.Read full article »

Windows in recovery mode: No fixed disks to show

I have a bunch of Windows Server VMs running in a VMware vSphere HomeLab. After nearly about three months of uptime, FreeNAS decided for yet some unclear reasons to crash completely (probably a kernel panic). End of the story: Windows installation was completely broken. Not booting anymore. Apparently the crash ocurred during update installation (perfect timing!).

To get the VMs back running I needed to change a few things using the Windows recovery mode. However diskpart showed: “There are no fixed disks to show“. Wondering why? Me too! Read full article »

HPE Gen8: Redundant boot devices with FreeNAS

Since more than a year I’m running FreeNAS on a dedicated HPE ML310e v2 Gen8 machine in my HomeLab as my main storage, mainly as a iSCSI server for my VMware ESXi nodes. However when building this specific setup, I’ve came across a limitation from the BIOS: Just like the HPE MicroServer Gen8 the ML310e v2-tower is only able to boot from the first attached SATA device. So when the system disk is not detected as the first disk or once the first boot device fails (partially), the FreeNAS machine can’t boot up anymore. Not something I was pretty happy about, specially because FreeNAS runs on small mirrored SSD drives.

Time to get a workaround in place to get across this limitations. However one important aspect was to keep FreeNAS untouched, to prevent that something breaks after future updates. After a lot of research and hardware reboots I was able to come up with a working solution for me…

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