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Using KMS for VMware View Windows Activation

Josh Townsend, Virtualization Practice Manager

Monday, February 20, 2012 - 3:26pm

When deploying or recomposing a pool of Windows 7 (or Windows Vista) virtual desktops on VMware View, you may receive an error message stating: “composer agent initialization error (16): Failed to activate software license (waited 0 seconds).” This error occurs when you use a Multiple Activation Key (MAK) to activate the parent VM. View Composer QuickPrep, by default, uses Microsoft Key Management Services (KMS). VMware KB Article 1026556 provides workarounds for activating MAK clients, or bypassing activation by QuickPrep so you can use a trial key. The workarounds are appropriate for test/pilot cases, but will eventually cause problems such as MAK key exhaustion. The proper way to license and activate a deployment of Windows 7 on VMware View is to use a KMS.

A KMS can be installed on any Windows Server version...

Disable VMware View Pool using Powershell PowerCLI

Rob Daniels, Network Operations Consultant

Monday, January 23, 2012 - 5:23pm

Have you ever wanted to disable a VDI pool from the command line, but couldn’t find the right command for the job? As simple as it may seem to do, VMware has yet to equip the PowerCLI Snap-in with a “disable-pool” commandlet. Some may try to accommodate this by simply removing pool entitlements, but you can be faced with the following error:

Remove-PoolEntitlement : PowershellService::RemovePoolEntitlement FAILED,

error=User with sid  has an active VDI Session on Pool . Entitlement cannot be

removed until this session is terminated.

This error is the result of an active desktop session attached to the entitlement being removed, or worse, anywhere within the VDI system as this is a global property. What this means is that if a user has an entitlement to more than one pool, this command may fail...

As drive sizes in storage arrays increase, should we keep putting eggs into larger baskets?

Ted Evans, Solutions Architect

Monday, November 7, 2011 - 10:03am

Hard drive sizes have increased again. It is just part of the evolution of technology. When it comes to using them in storage arrays however, bigger is not always better – or at least may not be the best course of action.

We now have the ability to put 900GB SAS and 3TB Nearline SAS drives into our storage designs. How does that change things? There are definitely some positives. Each time drive sizes move up, their individual performance and reliability hold steady or move slightly upward – so over time the traditional hard drive as a whole continues to improve. It also makes it easier to put more useable TB into a smaller sized array. It pushes the cost/GB down.

On the other side of the fence, larger hard drives allow for some potential pitfalls:

They make it easier to short cut on IOPS - What used to be a shelf of 300’s can now be stored on just five 900’s. In some cases this is a good thing,...

Thoughts on What's New in UCS Manager 2.0

Mike Rogers, Pre-Sales Technical Consultant

Thursday, September 29, 2011 - 8:48am

Don’t you love it when new firmware ships for your iPhone or Android device? New features and a great price—FREE! The bad part? Downtime. While updating your device firmware, you’re down hard; Five minutes maybe - No calls, no email, no tasks, nothing. Just you, the little spinning dial, and what seems like an eternity. When it’s done—oh the joy—it’s like a new device. Upgrading to UCS 2.0 is sort of like that, except the whole downtime part—the process is non-disruptive.

Announced at CiscoLive in July, UCS 2.0 has finally arrived. Plenty has been written about the new hardware and the benefits and flexibility to be had in both scalability and flexibility. Combining the new fabric interconnect (6248UP) with the new fabric extender (2208) and new VIC (1280) is great in big deployments with high throughput requirements and hundreds or thousands of VMs. But for the vast majority of my customers, the real news here is...

VMware Industry Overview: VMware End User Computing and VMware View Updates

Nathan Reynolds, Vice President of Sales

Monday, September 12, 2011 - 8:53am

As the afterglow of VMworld 2011 begins to fade, don’t overlook all that’s happening in VMware.

View 5 announced at VMworld. VMware announces View 5, just one of the trailblazing tools introduced to help organizations optimize their operations in the post PC-era. Among the many benefits, View 5 will deliver a higher degree of innovation and simplicity with protocol enhancements, advanced 3D graphics, scalable unified communications and integrated persona management. View 5 will streamline IT manageability and control – boasting as much as a 75 percent bandwidth improvement over LAN and WAN connections. Check out the 5 Amazing New Features of VMware View 5 and learn more about View 5 and the other VMworld 2011 product announcements.

EUC...

Top Ten Ways to Ensure Security with Your iPad

Nathan Reynolds, Vice President of Sales

Wednesday, September 7, 2011 - 8:41am

Clearpath’s clients include IT departments, C-level executives and small business owners. Many of them have deployed tablets, most often Apple’s iPad, as the result of a user population that is clamoring for the device and its form factor and innovative interface. Often my clients will ask me, “How should I go about managing the security risks that the iPad or iPhone add to our corporate security?” Since we at Clearpath host a number of our customers’ critical application infrastructures, including email, virtual desktop and proprietary applications, we have a good deal of experience helping our customers do just this. We deploy several applications in our cloud infrastructure that help to control the Apple iOS devices that our clients use. Many of our clients don’t have these capabilities, so I’ve put together a list of things that can be done which will ensure that you are protecting data as well as possible in small deployments.

It’s...

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