Horizon Agent: Installation fails at VM_BlastUDPReservePorts

I’m building customized and optimized Windows 10 images for my VDI, removing unnecessary stuff from the Windows installation (to name a few: unneeded drivers, retail/demo files, Hyper-V components). This reduces the disk and memory footprint. Once the customized Golden Image for the Linked Clones is finally installed in a virtual machine and optimized (with the OS Optimization Fling) accordingly, you need to install the VMware Horizon Agent at some point before rolling it out.

All preparations done. So guess what failed after days of optimization and dozens of Windows 10 image customizations? Yep, the VMware Horizon Agent installation…

Horizon Agent: The Rollback.

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VMware FAH Appliance: Making Of F@H-Stats

You might have seen my previous blog post about the VMware Appliance for Folding@Home. This article is about how the local console was made underneath – and actually how simple it is.

Usually when powering on a Linux-based operating system, you just get the usual login console after boot. I thought that it would be handy to see what or if something is ongoing without actually logging in – so in other words: Seeing how busy the virtual machine is, and what the Folding@Home software is doing.

So I went ahead figuring out a simple, fast and easy way showing both. Ending up with the idea: Using a terminal multiplexer, and showing the classic top and tail -f /var/lib/fahclient/log.txt.

That’s how it looks like (when Enable F@H Stats in VM Console was enabled during deployment):

Local Console / F@H Stats

This is how it works…Read full article »

VMware Appliance for Folding@Home

The PhotonOS-based appliance allows you quickly deploying the software by Folding@Home running protein folding calculations using your available CPU/GPU resources to help fighting COVID-19.

Deploying the OVA gives you different set of options:

Deployment of OVA through vCenter HTML5 Client

In the end, looking like:

(Guess who made that local console! Also posted on Twitter here.)

Want to know more?
Read the official blog post from VMware: octo.vmware.com/vmware-appliance-fah/

Interested in contributing?
Check out the fling website at flings.vmware.com/vmware-appliance-for-folding-home#summary.

The most amazing and exciting part of this project for me: From the idea by William Lam, creating and intensive testing (including GPUs!), writing documentation, going through audits and reviews until the final publication of the appliance – in just about 72 hours. It was really great to see how people work together, turning an idea into reality in just such a short period of time.

In case you’re interesting in finding out how I’ve made the "Local Console/F@H Stats", you might want to read my post over here.

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 »