Category: View 5.0

Performing Outage Free Maintenance on View Connection Servers

The question that I had during my View 5.1 ICM class was how to migrate active view sessions from one VMware View connection server to another, so that maintenance can be performed on one of the connection servers. The short version is that you if tunneling is used, you cant. This means that if you reboot your connection server you will drop connections and people will have to reconnect. Not such a huge deal, since if you are running into this scenario, you obviously have at least 2 connection servers which are probably load balanced and the users will simply reconnect.

I asked one of my fellow consultants who pointed me to this spot in the documentation. If you disable a connection server within the View Administrative console the active sessions will not be dropped, so it’s basically like doing a “disable logons” in XenApp. I would also then make sure that the load balancing mechanism was pointing only to the connection server that was enabled. This way you can disable a particular connection server the day before and let users gracefully disconnect, providing you have the capacity to be running with one less connection server. Not exactly migrating the session, but it’s better than nothing.

Or you could just send a message from View administrator saying, “You might need to reconnect.” Just food for thought in design.

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VMs getting stuck on Customizing with VMware View 5.0

I ran into this in a test lab environment and figured it would help to share. The View VMs in one of my test labs were hanging on the customization step, both linked clone VMs and full. I started troubleshooting and came across a couple pertient articles and really good ideas when this happens. The KB article on VMware’s site in regards to this problem highlights a few steps:

  1. Make sure the network is functioning between the desktops and the connection servers, DNS must resolve both ways and the required ports must be open. (see here)
  2. Verify that the template has been set up correctly (see here)
  3. Verify that the guest customization settings are correct and working. (see here)

None of these steps helped me fix the problem. The network was fine, the template was clean and was even pulled from a working environment and the guest customization was functioning and joining the machines to the domain with both quickprep and sysprep. Then I noticed the error that appeared when the customization timed out:

View Composer agent initialization state error (16): Failed to activate license (waited 1215 seconds)

So I flung that into google and found Terence Luk’s post about the specifics of this error message. The short version is chances are your VM’s install of Windows isn’t activated by whatever means. After reading through Terence’s article, I realized it must be a problem with the KMS server. I ran the command:

slmgr.vbs /dlv

from one of the machines and sure enough it wasn’t activated because there was no KMS server in my test domain.

Rather than standing up a separate KMS for my little test environment, I simply configured the base image to use use an existing KMS I have configured on the LAN by pointing my base image it to it.

slmgr.vbs /skms <IP address>

Then I ran an ATO to force KMS activation.

slmgr.vbs /ato

After running those commands pointed at a valid KMS server and taking another snapshot, the same templates and configuration spins up like a charm with both linked clones and full machines. Thanks to Terence for posting up originally!

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Added 8/23/2013

If you’re here and you’re looking to work around this error for your test lab, definitely check out this post, which goes over how to change a simple View agent reg-key that will bypass the license check.

http://www.seancrookston.com/blog/2011/01/27/failed-to-activate-the-software-license-workaround-vmware-view/comment-page-1/#comment-33338

 

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Added 12/2/2014

I also ran into a situation where deploying an unpatched Windows XP SP3 machine would fail due to inability to join the domain. Resolution is either get off that dog XP, install a MS patch or remove “Protect from Accidental Deletion” flag on the OU.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&docTypeID=DT_KB_1_1&externalId=1027087