Sluggish performance within Windows 7/10 VDI session (Non network related!)

by in Citrix XenApp, Citrix XenDesktop, Hardware, Horizon View, Infrastructure Checks, Lakeside, Systrack, Troubleshooting, Uncategorized, vCentre, VMware, VROPs, vSphere, Windows 10, Windows 7 | Leave a comment

I’ve come across this now with multiple customers. Most of the time it’s showing up when people are moving to windows 10, after experiencing poor performance with W7 desktop VMs and as part of the migration process, they buy all new tin.

They experience sluggish responses when opening various apps and for example with IE, it’s painfully obvious that something is wrong. It will spike the CPU to a high percentage, take quite a while to open, then the CPU will drop and it’ll be OK for browsing until more tabs are opened and similar behaviour will occur.

When this occurs, I always ask if there’s any resource pools set, any QoS or similar on the storage and so on, but generally, I know there isn’t. vSphere monitoring will show that everything is OK, so will anywhere you look within Horizon and vROPs. I’ll ask if the physical hardware has power management/saving on within the BIOS and I usually get the following answers:

“Oh, I’m sure it’s been turned off, but I didn’t build the servers”

“Yep, no power management, vSphere says so.”

“I don’t know. How do you even do that?”

“I’ve asked and they say it has been.”

Every time. Every. Time. 

It can be difficult to definitely show that this is the source of the problem when everything you have access to says it all should be OK, plus people also have many different levels of experience with these things. I came across it about 7 years ago when the company I worked for had a mix of Dell and HP servers and being a PC gaming enthusiast, I was always trying to eke out as much performance of a PC as I could, so I tried to do the same with servers – no overclocking though! So power saving settings would be the first thing to get turned off!

So if you’re experience similar problems, with apps spiking the CPU, being sluggish, then the CPU dropping, check your physical hardware to make sure power management isn’t set to power saving, it’ll save you a whole load of heart ache! This also applies to Citrix as well.

If you need proof of this, or want to check it, there’s various tools, but I always check using Systrack – we have a tool as part of the suite called Resolve, which allows for in-depth analysis of specific machines (as well as the ability to compare to other machines/groups) and this will show straight away if a machine is being throttled, or has memory ballooning. Throttling can also show if a CPU is overheating and the BIOS throttles it back to avoid shutting down – many a place have thought they need new machines, or new CPUs, but no, they simply need to get those dusty fans cleaned out!

throttle

May show up a little bit too small for some screens, but what you’d see, is the CPU is throttled to 66%. The CPU usage is low, but due to the throttling, the Thread count and interrupt per seconds are high. The CPU should be 100% or even higher with some modern CPUs, but unless you’re really trying to save some power… You don’t want it lower than 100%

What’s also interesting, is when people go back to the older servers with Windows 7 on and realise that the poor performance throughout, was also due to the power management not being turned off… as a fair few manufacturers ship hardware with this as default…

Volatile Environment/Client information

by in Horizon View, Uncategorized, VMware | Leave a comment

I recently had cause to revisit viewing/editing the values in the volatile environment key, within the view desktop session, for a customer who needed to identify various pieces of information from the connecting endpoint. One of our Devs needed to be able to find this information and pass it through to Systrack to create some bespoke dashboards, using what is produced within the volatile environment key. There’s some really useful information in here if you’ve never had cause to go through it!

HKCU\Volatile Environment\x

Client System Information

Horizon View Events DB viewer

by in Flings, Horizon View, Uncategorized, VMware | Leave a comment

I had a customer today who needed to see what was going on in the Events DB, as they were having issues with disconnects, without having to pull the information out manually using SQL. I came across the following fling that came in really useful:

https://labs.vmware.com/flings/horizon-view-events-database-export-utility#summary

In these circumstances, you’ll probably still need to check out the actual Horizon View and PCOIP logs

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1027744

App rationalisation – AppVolumes (Systrack)

by in AppVolumes, Systrack, Uncategorized, VMware | Leave a comment

I was recently working with a rather large finance customer who were moving to VDI (Horizon View) and even after engaging with VMware, were still none the wiser about how to rationalise and define what apps could be put on various Appstacks that would best server their users.

We came up with a dashboard that defined what apps would be in common appstacks per groups (say, office, chrome etc) and then ones that would be specific to groups (HR apps, finance apps etc). The customer could then easily see what apps were in use and how complex the app could potentially be to virtualise. This can really be used with any app layering tech, or even be manipulated for app delivery. It gave the customer visibility into their own estate, without having to involve any further 3rd parties. You’ll have to excuse the test data though! There’s plenty more on App Rationalisation and such I’ll post over time – it doesn’t really matter on the final delivery or virtualisation method as the data lets you work with any technology.

appvolumes image

VMware SDDC Certificate Tool Fling

by in Automation, Certificates, Flings, Uncategorized, vCentre, VMware, VROPs | Leave a comment

I think most people have had issues with replacing/updating certificates on the various virtual appliances that will be floating around their infrastructure, thankfully (and finally someone has done it!), there’s a fling created to help with this! Much kudos to the creators!

Replacing SSL certificates across VMware products is a manual and time-consuming process. The SDDC Certificate Tool automates this workflow and makes it easy to keep certificates across your SDDC up to date. It will replace all certificates in the supported products and reestablish trust between the components.

Supported Products

  • VMware Platform Services Controller (PSC)
  • VMware vCenter Server (VC)
  • VMware NSX for vSphere (NSX)
  • vRealize Log Insight (vRLI)
  • vRealize Operations Manager (vROps)
  • vRealize Automation (vRA)
  • vRealize Business for Cloud (vRB)

 

SDDC Certificate Tool

Visual ESXiTop

by in ESXI, Flings, Uncategorized, vCentre, VMware | Leave a comment

Not everyone likes digging into the VI/Command line, or it’s not always easy to get access, or the right person to do it…Then it’s even more awkward to get that information out to somebody…

 

Not anymore – thanks to the magic and hard work put into Flings!

https://labs.vmware.com/flings/visualesxtop

VisualEsxtop is an enhanced version of resxtop and esxtop. VisualEsxtop can connect to VMware vCenter Server or ESX hosts, and display ESX server stats with a better user interface and more advanced features.

Features

  1. Live connection to ESX host or vCenter Server
  2. Flexible way of batch output
  3. Load batch output and replay them
  4. Multiple windows to display different data at the same time
  5. Line chart for selected performance counters
  6. Flexible counter selection and filtering
  7. Embedded tooltip for counter description
  8. Color coding for important counters

Windows Storage Spaces

by in Storage Spaces, Uncategorized, Windows 10, Windows Server 2016 | Leave a comment

So I decided to build server 2016 about 3 months ago on a physical machine, seeing as though my other machines were Windows 10. I had a stack of hard drives and thought I’d use it for a storage server/NAS box. Then I decided to use it as a desktop machine. To cut a long story short, as much as 2016 works pretty well as a desktop, seeing as though it’s similar to W10, there were a few reasons that made me want to move back to W10.

But… I’d put in a few drives, set up storage spaces (it’s really easy) and as I was re-installing an OS (onto a different SSD as well), I cleared down everything on the drives and moved elsewhere, stupidly deleting some stuff that I thought I’d copied off in the midst, but doing so because I couldn’t find a straight answer whether the virtual drive I’d created within Storage Spaces, would carry to another OS. Most people said no. Most people were wrong.

Rebuilt with W10, lo and behold, my drives pop up, exactly the same, sans the files I’d deleted (Dammnit!).

So, moral of the story? Shifting from W10 to/from 2016 is probably going to keep your files, but I still probably wouldn’t risk it! 😉

VMware Workstation – Failed to Lock File, cannot open disk.

by in Uncategorized, VMware, VMware Workstation | Leave a comment

So like many people, I have workstation on my laptop for test lab, with a fully functioning domain, multiple machines etc and as it’s a laptop, I shut the lid…Wander off… Get on the train, or in the car… Then it doesn’t get turned on for a few days, or is on/off/on/off etc. Workstation obviously doesn’t like this and recently I’ve been getting complaints of locked files on my VM’s, which, I don’t want to rebuild or faff with…

So voila! A solution. Simply delete (or backup, depending on your cowboy nature) the .lck files/folders of the affected VM, re-power on…and sorted! Emergency over!