Tuesday, September 11, 2012

McAfee HIPS always causes extra work...

Using the default settings, the client-side interface does not provide much in the way of alerts.  I have been dealing with this product for several years, and it has plenty of ways to silently break all sorts of functionality.  For security reasons, HIPS is a necessary evil in many environments.  Most recently we found HIPS on our VDI master image and had to remove it, which was not as simple as uninstalling a regular application.

Here is a useful  KB for uninstalling HIPS in a McAfee-supported way:

https://kc.mcafee.com/corporate/index?page=content&id=KB58629

Friday, August 3, 2012

VMWare View Time Zone issue

I am starting to see an issue where thin clients are failing to synchronize time with Vista VM's in VMware View 4.6.  This article explains how to turn off time synchronization via a VMware GPO file, not sure if I am going to use this or not: going to use this immediately!  I have a set a of thin clients that use UTC and it is throwing the time off in the VDI environment.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1006773

Thursday, July 5, 2012

Packet loss with "Flexible" VMnic type

Ran into a packet loss issue today.  Normally I usually only use E1000's in production.  We had some Server 2003 VM's running with Flexible NICs.  Caused intermittent packet loss, once we changed them to VMXNet2 adapters, the connections were perfect.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1001805

Thursday, June 28, 2012

VMware View Domain Filtering...

I found a KB article discussing domain filtering using the VDMadmin command for View.  I hope this works!

**Update, this worked, FTW!!!!

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1014103

Another one, this one is for View 5.0:
http://pubs.vmware.com/view-50/index.jsp?topic=/com.vmware.view.administration.doc/GUID-3E9924EC-1554-43E5-A812-84F9711909A5.html

Monday, June 25, 2012

CCNA Subnet Calculator with wildcard masks

Useful for testing yourself on wildcard masks.  Make up your own IP range and figure out what the wildcard mask should be, then verify your work.

http://www.subnetonline.com/pages/subnet-calculators/ipv4-wildcard-calculator.php

Running VMware View Client over ICA...

This is a bad idea.  I read about it awhile back and wanted to try it.  The idea of hosting the View Client on a XenApp server is very practical on networks that have an existing XenApp infrastucture.  However, the performance hit that I observed was significant when compared to simply using the View Client over the WAN.  This is probably because the graphics traffic is getting re-rendered two times; once by the View Client (PCoIP) and once by the Citirx Client (ICA).  The resulting slow down was workable, but not something I would want end-users to experience.