Speed Up Your Horizon View Operations

How to speed up your Horizon View operations, you might ask? Well, you don’t have to buy an all-flash storage system or beef up your ESX hosts.

VMware Horizon View Administrator has some settings on max concurrent operations with vCenter and VMware View Composer. Increasing some of those settings can decrease the time of those operations, however when decreasing those settings, you can limit the amount of IOPs pushed to your underlying storage system, too.

Screen Shot 2015-06-26 at 5.22.46 PM

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Limit IOPs Per VMDK

One of the many features in VMware vSphere, which I didn’t know, is the capability, to limit IOPs per VMDK without setting any limitations on the underlying storage system or for the whole Virtual Machine.

LimitIOPerVM

As you can see on the image above, it is easy to limit the IOPs per VMDK within the vSphere web-client.
Just browse to your Virtual Machine and go to edit settings. Select the “Hard drive”, which you would limit on IOPs and expand it.

Note: By default, all VMDKs are set to unlimited IOPs.

What’s New With VMware Hardware Version 11

As vSphere 6.0 and ESX 6.0 got released, also a new Virtual Machine Hardware Version was released.
Hardware Version 11 is the latest available version and is only supported on ESX 6.0 and later.

So, what’s new with VMware Hardware Version 11?

  • Boot Virtual Machines with EFI Support
  • Full integration with VMwarevCloud Air (private cloud)
    • Ability to create and migrate VMs from your local vSphere instance
  • The follow Operating Systems are now fully supported
    • Windows 8.1 Update
    • Windows Server 2012 RC2
    • Ubuntu 14.10
    • Red Hat 7
    • CentOS 7
    • Suse 12
    • OpenSuse 13.2

The list above is just the highlights and a full list including known issues with hardware version 11 can be found here.

Virtual Machine Monitoring For APD & PDL

As I use vCenter 6 more and more, I realize all the amazing new features.

One of the features, I came across was Virtual Machine Responses.
This feature allows you to specify what to do in the event of an APD and PDL. Come on, how cool is this?!?
I bet everyone ran into an APD or PDL situation before and asked him/her-self, why does VMware not offer a feature to restart the VM in such an event?

Virtual Machine Response 01

By default, when vSphere HA enabled, Virtual Machine Monitoring is disabled and so are the responses. However, you do not need to enable Virtual Machine Monitoring for Virtual Machine Responses to work.
The screenshot below show you the available settings for APD vs PDL. As you can see, in the event of an APD, you have 4 options:

  1. Disabled – do nothing and let the machine die
  2. Issue events – Issue a custom event
  3. Power off and restart VMs (conservative), will try to properly shut down the VM and restart it on another host
  4. Power off and restart VMs (aggressive), will forcefully shut down the VM and restart it on another host.

APD

Similar settings are available in the event of PDL.

PDL

 

Important, this feature will NOT protect your VM from losing a RDM and will also not work with vSphere Fault Tolerance (FT)