This posting is ~3 years years old. You should keep this in mind. IT is a short living business. This information might be outdated.
Using physical clients as Horizon View agents is pretty common for me. My office pc, as well as my Lenovo X250 are often used by using the Horizon View Client and the Blast protocol. But as good as the performance is, there were a couple of things that bugged me.
On my office pc, I encountered pretty often a black screen, either on first connect, or on reconnect. The typical issue caused by misconfigured firewall policies, but this was completly out of scope in this case, because my collegues never had issues with black screens. The problem occured with different versions of View Agent.
I finally fixed it after I tried to connected per HTML5 client. I got an error, that the connection server was unable to connect to 172.28.208.1. Huh? I don’t know this address… I checked my office pc and found out that this IP was assigned to the Hyper-V virtual switch.
n.n.n.n/m is the subnet on which your View Agent should be connected by the Connection Server.
The second issue was that my client constantly failed to reboot. I clicked reboot, and the machine was gone. No TeamViewer, no RDP, no PING. Only a hard power-off helped to get it back to work.
This posting is ~3 years years old. You should keep this in mind. IT is a short living business. This information might be outdated.
One of my customers purchased a bunch of Microsoft 365 subscriptions in order to use them with Office 365 and Windows 10 Enterprise. The customer called me because he had trouble to activate the Windows 10 Enterprise license.
Source: Microsoft
I would like so summarize some of the requirements in order to successfuly active Windows 10 Enterprise subscriptions.
License
First of all, there is a licensing requirement. You need at least a Windows 10 Pro or Windows 10 Pro Education. You need one of these licenses! There is no way to use the Windows 10 Enterprise subscription without a base license, because it’s an upgrade!
In case of my customer, the Pro license was missing. After adding and activating a Pro key, the key and edition was automatically updated to Windows 10 Enterprise.
AzureAD
In ordner to activate the license, the devices must be Azure AD-joined or Hybrid Azure AD joined. Workgroup-joined or Azure AD registered devices are not supported!
The Windows 10 Enterprise license must assigned to the user. The license can’t assigned to a device. Without an assigned license, the device can’t upgrade from a Pro to an Enterprise license.
This posting is ~4 years years old. You should keep this in mind. IT is a short living business. This information might be outdated.
THIS IS FIXED in ESXi 6.5 U3 and 6.7 U3.
See KB67426 (Performance issues with Windows 10 version 1809 VMs running on snapshots) for more information.
TL;DR: This bug is still up to date and has not been fixed yet! Some user in the VMTN thread mentioned a hotpatch from VMware, which seems to be pulled. A fix for this issue will be available with ESXi 6.5 U3 and 6.7 U3. The only workaround is to place VMs on VMFS 5 datastores, or avoid the use of snapshots if you have to use VMFS 6. I can confirm, that Windows 1903 is also affected.
One of my customers told me that they have massive performance problems with a Horizon View deployment at one of their customers. We talked about this issue and they mentioned, that this was related to Windows 10 1809 and VMFS 6. A short investigation showed, that this issue was well known, and even VMware is working on this. In their case, another IT company installed the Cisco HyperFlex solution and the engineer was unaware of this issue.
Image by Manfred Antranias Zimmer from Pixabay
What do we know so far? In October 2018 (!), shortly after the release of Windows 10 1809, a thread came up in the VMTN (windows 10 1809 slow). According to the posted test results, the issue occurs under the following conditions.
Windows 10 1809
VMware ESXi 6.5 or 6.7 (regardless from build level)
VM has at least one snapshot
VM is placed on a VMFS 6 datastore
Space reclamation is enabled or disabled
The “official” statement of the VMware support is:
The issue is identified to be due to some guest OS behavior change in this version of windows 10, 1809 w.r.t thin provisioned disks and snapshots, this has been confirmed as a bug and will be fixed in the following releases – 6.5 U3 and 6.7U3, which will be released within End of this year (2019).
I don’t care if the root cause is VMFS 6 or Windows 10. But VMware and Microsoft needs to get this fixed fast! Just to make this clear: You will face the same issues, regardless if you run Windows 10 in a VM, use Windows 10 with Horizon View, or Windows 10 with Citrix. When VMFS 6 and Snapshots comes into play, you will ran into this performance issue.
I will update this blog post when I get some news.
This posting is ~6 years years old. You should keep this in mind. IT is a short living business. This information might be outdated.
Last month, I wrote about a very annoying issue, that I discovered during a Windows 10 VDI deployment: Roaming of the AppData\Local folder breaks the Start Menu of Windows 10 Enterprise (Roaming of AppData\Local breaks Windows 10 Start Menu). During research, I stumbled over dozens of threads about this issue.
Today, after hours and hours of testing, troubleshooting and reading, I might have found a solution.
The environment
Currently I don’t know if this is a workaround, a weird hack, or no solution at all. Maybe it was luck that none of my 2074203423 logins at different linked-clones resulted in a broken start menu. The customer is running:
Horizon View 7.1
Windows 10 Enterprise N LTSB 2016 (1607)
View Agent 7.1 with enabled Persona Management
Searching for a solution
During my tests, I tried to discover WHY the TileDataLayer breaks. As I wrote in my earlier blog post, it is sufficient to delete the TileDataLayer folder. The folder will be recreated during the next logon, and the start menu is working again. Today, I added path for path to “Files and folders excluded from roamin” GPO setting, and at some point I had a working start menu. With this in mind, I did some research and stumbled over a VMware Communities thread (Vmware Horizon View 7.0.3 – Linked clone – Persistent mode – Persona management – Windows 10 (1607) – -> Windows 10 Start Menu doesn’t work)
User oliober did the same: He roamed only a couple of folders, one of them is the TileDataLayer folder, but not the whole Appdata\Local folder.
The “solution”
To make a long story short: You have to enable the roaming of AppData\Local, but then you exclude AppData\Local, and add only necessary folders to the exclusion list of the exclusion. Sounds funny, but it seems to work.
Patrick Terlisten/ www.vcloudnine.de/ Creative Commons CC0
Feedback is welcome!
I am very interested in feedback. It would be great if you have the chance to verify this behaviour. Please leave a comment with your results.
As I already said: I don’t know if this is a workaround, a hack, a solution, or no solution at all. But for now, it seems to work. Microsoft deprecated TileDataLayer in Windows 10 1703. So for this new Windows 10 build, we have to find another working solution. The above described “solution” only works for 1607. But if you are using the Long Term Service Branch, this solution will work for the next 10 years. ;)
This posting is ~6 years years old. You should keep this in mind. IT is a short living business. This information might be outdated.
Disclaimer: The information from this blog post is provided on an “AS IS” basis, without warranties, both express and implied.
Last week, I had an interesting discussion with a customer. Some months back, the customer has decided to kick-off a PoC for a VMware Horizon View based virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). He is currently using fat-clients with Windows 8.1, and the new environment should run on Windows 10 Enterprise. Last week, we discussed the idea of using Windows Server 2012 R2 as desktop OS.
Horizon View with Windows Server as desktop OS?
My customer has planned to use VMware Horizon View. The latest release is VMware Horizon View 7.2. VMware KB article 2150295 (Supported Guest Operating Systems for Horizon Agent and Remote Experience) lists all supported (non-Windows 10) Microsoft operating systems for different Horizon VIew releases. This article shows, that Windows Server 2012 R2 (Standard and Datacenter) are both supported with all Horizon View releases, starting with Horizon View 7.0. The installation of a View Agent is supported, and you can create full- and linked-clone desktop pools. But there is also another important KB article: 2150305 (Feature Support Matrix for Horizon Agent). This article lists all available features, and whether they are compatible with a specific OS or not. According to this artice, the
Windows Media MMR,
VMware Client IP Transparency, and the
Horizon Virtualization Pack for Skype for Business
are not supported with Windows Server 2012 R2 and 2016.
From the support perspective, it’s safe to use Windows Server 2012 R2, or 2016, as desktop OS for a VMware Horizon View based virtual desktop infrastructure.
Licensing
Licensing Microsoft Windows for VDI is PITA. It’s all about the virtual desktop access rights, that can be acquired on two different ways:
Software Assurance (SA), or
Windows Virtual Desktop Access (VDA)
SA and VDA are available per-user and per-device.
Microsoft/ microsoft.com
You need a SA or a VDA for each accessing device or user. There is no need for additional licenses for your virtual desktops! You will get the right to install Windows 10 Enterprise on your virtual desktops. This includes the LTSB (Long Term Servicing Branch). LTSP offers updates without delivery of new features for the duration of mainstream support (5 years), and extended support (5 years). Another side effect is, that LTSB does not include most of the annoying Windows apps.
Do yourself a favor, and do not try to setup a VDI with Windows 10 Professional…
Service providers, that offer Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS), are explicitly excluded from this licensing! They must license their stuff according to Microsofts Services Provider Licensing Agreement (SPLA).
How do I have to license Windows Server 2012 R2, if I want to use Windows Server as desktop OS? Windows Server datacenter licensing allows you to run an unlimited number of server VMs on your licensed hardware. To be clear: Windows Server is licensed per physical server, and there is nothing like license mobility! To license the access to the server, your need two different licenses:
Windows Server CAL (device or user), and
Remote Desktop Services (RDS) CAL (device or user)
The Windows Server CAL is needed for any access to a Microsoft Windows Server from a client, regardless what service is used (even for DHCP). The RDS CAL must be asssigned to any user or device, that is directly or indirectly interacting with the Windows Server desktop, or using a remote desktop access technology (RDS, PCoIP, Blast Extreme etc.) to access the Windows Server desktop.
With this license setup, you have licensed the Windows Server VM itself, and also the access to this VM. There is no need to purchase a SA or VDA.
Do the math
With this in mind, you have to do the math. Compare the licensing costs for Windows 10 and Windows Server 2012 R2/ 2016 in your specific situation. Setup a PoC to verify your requirements, and the support of your software on Windows Server.
Windows Server can be an interesting alternative compared to Windows 10. Maybe some of you, that already use it with Horizon View, have time to add some comments to this blog post. It would be nice to get some feedback about this topic.
This posting is ~6 years years old. You should keep this in mind. IT is a short living business. This information might be outdated.
One of my customers has started a project to create a Windows 10 Enterprise (LTSB 2016) master for their VMware Horizon View environment. Beside the fact (okay, it is more a personal feeling), that Windows 10 is a real PITA for VDI, I noticed an interesting issue during tests.
The issue
For convenience, I adopted some settings of the current Persona Management GPO for Windows 7 for the new Windows 10 environment. During the tests, the customer and I noticed a strange behaviour: After login, the start menu won’t open. The only solution was to logoff and delete the persona folder (most folders are redirected using native Folder Redirections, not the redirection feature of the View Persona Management). While debugging this issue, I found this error in the eventlog.
If you google this, you will find many, many threads about this. Most solutions describe, that you have to delete the profile due to wrong permissions on profile folders and/ or registry hives. I used Microsofts Procmon to verify this, but I was unable to confirm that. After further investigations, I found hints, that the TileDataLayer database could be the problem. The database is located in AppData\Local\TileDataLayer\Database and stores the installed apps, programs, and tiles for the Start Menu. AFAIK it also includes the Start Menu layout.
Patrick Terlisten/ www.vcloudnine.de/ Creative Commons CC0
The database is part of the local part of the profile. A quick check proved, that it’s sufficient to delete the TileDataLayer folder. It will be recreated during the next logon.
The solution
It’s simple: Don’t roam AppData\Local. It should not be necessary to roam the local part of a users profile. The View Persona Management offers an option to roam the local part the profile. You can configure this behaviour with a GPO setting.
Patrick Terlisten/ www.vcloudnine.de/ Creative Commons CC0
You can find this setting under Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > VMware View Agent Configuration > Persona Management > Roaming & Synchronization
I was able to reproduce the observed behavior in my lab with Windows 10 Enterprise (LTSB 2016) and Horizon View 7.0.3. Because of this, I tend to recommend not to roam AppData\Local.
This posting is ~6 years years old. You should keep this in mind. IT is a short living business. This information might be outdated.
I switched my mobile carrier and my new carrier doesn’t offer multi SIM (but hey, it’s cheap and sufficient for my needs). Now I have to use my iPhone as WiFi hotspot. No big deal, works perfect. Except one thing: When I was using the built-in 4G modem in my laptop, Windows 10 knew that it was using a mobile (metered) connection, and suspended some services like OneDrive sync, download of Windows Updates etc. That is pretty handy in times of “flatrates” with single digit GB highspeed data volume.
Metered WiFi connection
You can mark a WiFi connection as metered in Windows 10, but you need administrator rights to change the setting. And when you switch back to your normal work user, Windows 10 treats the connection still as metered, but the Windows 10 GUIs shows the setting as disabled and greyed out.
Patrick Terlisten/ www.vcloudnine.de/ Creative Commons CC0
Use netsh instead
You can change, or check, the setting with netsh. Simply start an elevated command prompt and set the desired WiFi connection cost setting to fixed:
netsh wlan set profileparameter name=<name of your WiFi connection> cost=fixed
The setting cost=fixed marks the WiFi connection as metered. That’s it. From this point, Windows 10 will treat this connection as metered, until the cost setting is changed to “unrestricted”.
This posting is ~7 years years old. You should keep this in mind. IT is a short living business. This information might be outdated.
Today, I have stumbled upon a fact that is worth being documented.
TL;DR: Use the “Windows Srv 2016 DataCtr/Std KMS” host key (CSVLK), if you want to activate Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB 2016 using KMS. Or use AD-based activation. For more information read the blog post of the Ask the Core Team: Windows Server 2016 Volume Activation Tips.
A customer wants to deploy Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB 2016. A Windows Server 2012 R2 is acting as KMS host, and successfully activates Windows Server 2012 R2 and Microsoft Office 2013 Professional Plus. The “Windows Srv 2012R2 DataCtr/Std KMS for Windows 10” CSVLK was successfully installed. Nevertheless, the “current count” value does not increase. The client logged the event 12288:
The client has sent an activation request to the key management service machine.
Info:
0xC004F042, 0x00000000, kms.domain.tld:1688, eda39663-0611-4906-b443-47e937c969d5, 2016/11/29 12:49, 0, 5, 0, 2d5a5a60-3040-48bf-beb0-fcd770c20ce0, 25
On the server-side, I found the event 12290:
Description: An activation request has been processed.
Info:
0xC004F042,25,client.domain.tld,07c496ea-1a4e-487e-8668-38eff198dd97,2016/11/29 10:50,0,5,0,2d5a5a60-3040-48bf-beb0-fcd770c20ce0
Error 0xC004F042 means:
The Software Protection Service determined that the specified Key Management Service (KMS) cannot be used.
It took a time to find the root cause, because I knew that Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB 2015 can successfully activated with this key. At the end it’s a question of the right search terms… Finally, I found the Ask the Core Team blog post. With the rightkey, the “current count” value increased, and finally the deployed Windows 10 Enterprise VMs were successfully activated.
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