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“Pimp my vLab”
Mike Laverick recently made aware of a nice alternative to home labs. I have an extensive home lab at home so I think it’s too late for me now but I did contemplate getting a hosted lab rather than kill my electricity and upset the wife. But too late for me but not for you. Check out Mike’s article here:
http://www.mikelaverick.com/2013/03/not-ready-bare-metal-cloud-for-your-auto-lab/
Quote:
“When I was in Australia recently for the Sydney/Melbourne VMUG I had the chance to meet Alastair Cooke – and sit in on his presentation on AutoLab. Alastair is a VMware Certified Instructor (VCI) based in New Zealand, and is one of the hosts of the APAC VMTN Communities Podcast. In case you don’t know AutoLab is tool that will build for you using scripts a vSphere Lab environment – and its based on the principle of “nested ESX” or “vESX” – where ESX is run in VM on a physical ESX host. It’s was updated in Dec, 2012 to support vSphere 5.1.”
Popularity: 7% [?]
Optimise VDI and maybe Win an Apple TV (VMUG)
On 17th of April I will be presenting at the Leeds VMUG. Session is about Optimise Virtual Desktops & ProfileUnity. Come see my presentation, bring a business card for a chance to win an Apple TV. My session is part community part vendor pitch. People are just starting to take VDI seriously now and if you want some ideas to get started come see my session. My topics will include:
- Where to start
- Building a base image
- Deployment using a broker
- Dynamically define a desktop
- Deliver Apps
Should be interesting….remember bring a business card for a chance to win an Apple TV.
BTW…the night before there is a vBeers sponsored by Whiptail.
Popularity: 5% [?]
Defective Clone – Rouge Local Profile
I found an issue in my lab and I think it would be useful to post about it on my blog. In my lab I was running a 2003 Domain, vSphere 5 and VMware View 5.0. Everything was working just fine until recently when I upgraded my Domain to 2008. Straight away I noticed that my XP desktops no longer attached to the domain using VMware View Quickprep. This is common issue which is well documented and fixed with this hotfix from Microsoft:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/944043
Then I noticed my Windows 7 View desktops acting erratic but only for one user. I use ProfileUnity on my lab to manage profiles and my first thought was “delete the profile for this user” user being “ricky”. Actually this made no difference at all. I just couldn’t put my finger on it, and then I remember something. When I setup my master View linked clone image for my Windows 7 desktops I remember I logged in with the user “ricky” so that meant there was a local cache copy of a profile for “ricky” in the master image.
What I did next was open up the master image, logged on as Administrator and deleted the local cache copy of the profile folder for “ricky”
I found this wasn’t enough. In the registry there is a key also associated with this profile which I had to delete and is found:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList\S-1-5-21-45054391-3288665767-689454583-1000]
The key at the end S-1-5-21-blah blah blah will differ from user to user. To find the right one just delete the one that has the username in the ProfileImagePath string.
This fixed the problem and I can only guess that the issue lay in a change in SIDs when upgrading the domain. Whatever it was my domain had its knickers in a twist with this user profile.
You could argue there is a GPO that cleans up local cache profile, however that only works when you logout. My issue was the rouge local cache profile was embedded in the View linked clone master.
Popularity: 7% [?]