Tag Archives: VMware

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Support Ticket Template – Helping you help your vendor support teams

Below is a support template I crafted with some members of our VMware GSS team, to help my customers reduce the typical back and forth information gathering to help them get to a resolution faster.

Instead when logging a ticket, my customers can log all the necessary information upfront.

Hopefully you will find this useful, and it can be used/adapted to use with other vendor support teams or even internally within your own business.

[Customer Information]
1. Engineer name:
2. What is the Business Impact?

[Product and Environment Information]
1. Environment Name:
2. What VMware products has the customer deployed?
3. What type of environment is impacted?
4. What was the customer doing when the problem was observed?
5. List FQDN and IP for each impacted device:

[Problem Description]
1. Describe the specific problem symptoms:
2. When was the problem first observed (Date/Time)?
3. When was the problem most recently observed (Date/Time)?
4. Describe the recurrence pattern for the problem if existing:

[Problem Troubleshooting]
1. What investigation has been conducted by the customer (give a full report)?
2. If a workaround has been attempted, describe the steps and outcome:

[Ask to VMware GSS]
1.What specific request is made of GSS?

[Logs]
Please collect all relevant product logs and upload them to the SR as outlined here for review:
https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1008524
https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1008525

Regards

Dean

 

VMwareHorizonView

VMware Horizon Blast – Failed to Connect to Connection Server

After deploying my latest horizon lab, I hit an issue where I could not hit the login page to authenticate for a Horizon desktop using BLAST, I would be greeted by the following message:

Failed to Connect to Connection Server

failed to connect to connection server

I pulled my hair out for a few minutes, before I realised I’ve hit this issue before, and the fix is quite simple.

If the locked.properties file doesn’t exist in the directory C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware View\Server\sslgateway\conf then you must create it!

locked.properties checkOrigin false

Regards

Dean

cleanup

VDI Cleanup script I use before sealing any golden image before deployment

Below is the VDI Cleanup script that I’ve been using over the years. I thought I’d post this after setting up a Horizon Lab environment. I shared it earlier in the year on Reddit, and had some good suggestions which I used to update the script. The script has been taken from other blogs over the years and just edited further and further for my own/customers needs.

Optimizations to any master are done using the VMware OS Optimization Tool.

I personally just run this as bat file to clean up and shut down the master template as a final step each time I make an update.

You can find the script on Github here, or below.

REM ************************************************
REM Stopping and disabling Windows Telemetry service
REM ************************************************
sc stop DiagTrack
sc config DiagTrack start= disabled
sc stop dmwappushservice
sc config dmwappushservice start= disabled
REM *********************
REM Stop and disable Windows update service
REM *********************
sc stop wuauserv
sc config wuauserv start= disabled
REM *********************
REM Delete any existing shadow copies
REM *********************
vssadmin delete shadows /All /Quiet
REM *********************
REM delete files in c:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Download\
REM *********************
del c:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Download\*.* /f /s /q
REM *********************
REM delete hidden install files
REM *********************
del %windir%\$NT* /f /s /q /a:h
REM *********************
REM delete prefetch files
REM *********************
del c:\Windows\Prefetch\*.* /f /s /q
REM *********************
REM Update OEM Information with Build Date
reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\OEMInformation /v Model /d "Build %DATE%" /t REG_EXPAND_SZ /f
REM *********************
REM Run Disk Cleanup to remove temp files, empty recycle bin
REM and remove other unneeded files
REM Note: Makes sure to run c:\windows\system32\cleanmgr /sageset:1 command 
REM       on your initially created parent image and check all the boxes 
REM       of items you want to delete 
REM *********************
c:\windows\system32\cleanmgr /sagerun:1
REM ********************
REM Defragment the VM disk
REM ********************
sc config defragsvc start= auto
net start defragsvc
defrag c: /U /V
net stop defragsvc
sc config defragsvc start = disabled
REM *********************
REM Clear all event logs
REM *********************
wevtutil el 1>cleaneventlog.txt
for /f %%x in (cleaneventlog.txt) do wevtutil cl %%x
del cleaneventlog.txt
REM *********************
REM release IP address
REM *********************
ipconfig /release
REM *********************
REM Flush DNS
REM *********************
ipconfig /flushdns
REM *********************
REM Shutdown VM
REM *********************
shutdown /s /t 0

Regards

Dean

LCM Migration vRSLCM Easy installer5

VMware vRealize LifeCycle Manager 8 – Migration Process Screenshots

VMware vRealize LifeCycle Manager 8 released earlier this week, 17th October 2019.

Note the official name and abbreviation, its a long one!

  • vRSLCM (vRealize Suite LifeCycle Manager)

You can find the supporting official documentation here;

What's New Blog Link:
What's New Blog Post

Download Link:
Product Download

Release Notes:
Release Notes

Documentation Link:
Resources
Migration Process

The best news about this release is the “easy installer“, which also allows you to migrate from older versions. In this post, I’ve documented the screenshots in steps for you, as I know many of you out there like to see the end to end process before you undergo an update yourself, so you know what to expect.

During this migration process the following will happen;

  1. New LCM virtual appliance deployed
  2. New IDM appliance deployed (unless you select to link to an existing environment)
  3. Existing LCM settings and content will be migrated
Migration Process Screenshots

Continue reading VMware vRealize LifeCycle Manager 8 – Migration Process Screenshots

2019 08 27 13 01 39

VMware Ports and Protocols – All in one place!

Getting hold of all the VMware products various ports and protocols has sometimes come across like pulling blood from a stone.

However as announced yesterday at VMworld 2019, we have a new dedicated website just for this subject!

https://ports.vmware.com/

At a high-level, this system offers the following features:

  • A centralized system that is easy for our product teams to publish and modify and update the ports and protocols for each product.
  • Provides capability to customers with several Search filters on products, releases, port number, protocol, purpose and so on.
  • Download feature filtered data for offline view.

And for all you dark theme lovers out there, yes there is also a dark theme option!

VMware ports and protocols screenshot

Regards

Dean