Troubleshooting Instant Clones

So, this never happens does it. You push out a new image, go away make a cup of tea and come back to find out that the Instant clones failed, and then maintenance routine loop begins. It would be so nice to be able to see why the IC failed wouldn’t it!!

Well, there is a way to prevent Horizon from deleting the failed VM’s. In VMware Horizon 2303 and older there’s a parameter that needs to be enabled under the Configuration Parameters on the master image that’s failing. Select Edit setting on the VM in question and select the VM Options tab. Expand on the Advanced menu.

select EDIT CONFIGURATION

Select the Filter and search for cloneprep.debug.mode

If the parameter doesn’t show up you will need to add it manually using the ADD CONFIGURATION PARAMS

Assuming the parameter is there, and it need to be enabled, change the value to True and click OK.

Next time you provision, resync the Virtual Machine and it fails the VMs will remain in vSphere until you manually remove them. So, be sure to change the value back to false after you have finished troubleshooting the issue.

Horizon Instant Clone Maintenance

So I was cleaning up some of the pools I created in my lab today and noticed I had a few cp-templates, cp-replica left over. I removed all the pools and had 4 VM’s remaining and protected i.e. from vCenter I was not able to delete them. With no other pools left, I knew these are leftovers.

So after a quick google, I come to this KB article Instant-Clone Maintenance Utilities

So I hop over the first Connection server opened a command prompt

Changed to the following location

C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware View\Server\tools\bin

and ran the command IcUnprotect.cmd -vc lab-vdi-vc01.fqdn -uid administrator@vsphere.local

Then in vCenter I was able to delete the VM’s

Bobs you uncle, they are all gone!

Enabling Logon Segments in Horizon Help Desk Tool

The Horizon Help-desk tool is a web application that’s perfect for level 1 support, it will give a ton of information in one place. Its was a fling till Horizon 7.2 but I can’t tell you how many times customers have told me it’s not working for them. See the highlighted areas where we should see data.

No Logon time or Duration

To enable this feature a few things need to be in place and configured.

• Horizon Enterprise license

• Events database

• Enable timing profiler (Disabled by default)

• Set VMware Horizon View Logon Monitor to Automatic on the base image (Set to Manual)

Assuming the first two requirements are met the last two are normally missed, so to enable them first connect to the Connection Servers and perform the following via command prompt.

vdmadmin -I -timingProfiler -enable

The second command is used to enable this service on the remaining Connection Servers

Next we enable the VMware Horizon View Logon Monitor on the base image. Change the service from Manual to Automatic. Shutdown and Snap the Base image and Push to the pool

After the push of the new image and login I have now some data populated

The data can take a few minutes to populate

So what does all this mean? I got the information from VMware Docs but this is a break down of what all the metrics mean.

Cloud Pod Architecture - Flow

I created this Flow chart to help customers understand the how Cloud Pod Architecture (CPA) works and how the decisions are made. The Flow will change with the release of Horizon Cloud and once I get to play with that I will update.