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.
Read full article »

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 »

Log Insight: 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 »