A few weeks ago, I did a research with Leee Jeffries for GO‑EUC on NVMe memory tiering versus traditional swap in VMware ESXi. VMware ESXi Memory Management Reimagined: NVMe Tiering vs Traditional Swap | GO-EUC The article sparked some great discussions and there is an important caveat when it comes to vGPU desktops that I want to highlight. vGPU Desktops Always Need Full DRAM Here’s the thing that often trips people up: every VM with a vGPU requires all of its RAM to be rese

Single Sign-On in modern environments can be a beautiful thing, until it isn’t. You’ve federated Entra ID to Omnissa Access, implemented Hybrid Join, and everything works perfectly when users log in with their username and password. But then you try it externally. TrueSSO is in place to make VDI logins seamless, certificates replace passwords and suddenly the PRT never shows up. Microsoft apps (Teams v2 being the most noticeable) rely increasingly on the PRT for full Single S

You know, most VDI environments run like a well painted canvas. The default FSLogix GPO covers most users with smooth even strokes. They are happy users, their profiles load fast, and the picture looks just right. But then there are the VIPs, those special users with bold bright colors. The users with massive OST caches that need a bigger space, or the sales crew whose Teams data just keeps growing like a happy little forest. This is when the ObjectSpecific keys step in, like

A while ago I created a discission tree to explain/help customers and coworkers with a couple of the design choices possible with the FSLogix Office 365 and/or the Profile Containers. I thought to share this, hoping this will help others in their decision making! If you need any help, additional explanation, have any remarks or additions I should add, please let me know! First starting with some of the basics, if you don't need the basics just scroll down to use the chart! W

Recently I had a little challenge with an on Prem VMware Horizon VDI environment and the implementation with FSLogix Office and Profile Containers. Due to restrictions there was only one file server available based on Microsoft. In case of an outage the server is replicated to another datacenter but it would take a short time to be available. This and the fact of course the server needs Windows Patches with their respective reboots gave me a bit of a puzzle. Why? Well if an F

On a recent project I had to deploy multiple VMware UAG’s for external access. The UAGS are hosted at a cloud provider and the only access I had was the vCloud director. So no PowerShell deployment or the default OVA deployment trough vCenter. Unfortunately the deployment did not work, the backend team was not available at the time (bigger priorities and Ok fair enough Friday late in the afternoon) so no escape to a regular deployment and of course I gave myself a deadline fo

A while ago me and my friend and colleague JP Ruitenbeek were “flown in” to investigate performance issues at a customer. We found multiple issues but in this one we focus on a specific one: “The After-reboot jobs.” The Start: Lately a lot of complaints received the IT department of this customer about performance, latencies and login issues. The users were simply losing trust in the environment. Sum up some of the complaints: · Login times very high · Slown

VMware Horizon Instant Clones and Active Directory Computer GPO’s.. There is just a little caveat with Instant Clones where the GPO's don't always seem to apply.. I’ve seen a couple of times people struggling with this especially when they are used work with Citrix PVS, MCS, VMware Linked Clones, persistent VDI's or anything that has a regular boot process.. So in this blog I will explain why this happens with Instant Clones and a way to cope with this. We seem to always need

As mentioned in my previous blog I was discussing a valid migration scenario between an existing Citrix Deployment to VMware Horizon with my buddy Henry Heres. One of the steps is to migrate the external portal from Citrix (Unified) Gateway to VMware WS One Access. This will be a divided in to two blogs describing the 2 steps. This blog is Step 2! In this step we will switch the portal to VMware WS One Access. Same as the previous one, I will show the flow, Henry will show t

A while ago I was discussing a valid migration scenario between an existing Citrix Deployment to VMware Horizon with my buddy Henry Heres. One of the steps is to migrate the external portal from Citrix (Unified) Gateway to VMware WS One Access. As seen before, discussing these kind of scenarios with Henry is like planting a seed and pouring a gallon of Pokon on top of it. So, we decided to do a Cross reference Blog. I will show the flow, the blog(s) made by Henry will show h

Regularly I get questions about the flow when a user is getting external access and the relationship between the Unified Access Gateways, load balancers and the Connection servers. Especially because we sometimes need to deviate from the VMware Reference Architecture. This deviation could generate an error on the connection server. Most engineers cannot stand an error... they just want to eliminate it! (And of course, I praise them for it!) NuBut like many things in life, som

On a recent project a customer is moving it’s on-premises Exchange to Exchange Online. We decided VMware Access is the IDP for Microsoft 365. Well federated the Microsoft tenant with VMware Access and to get single sign on from the Horizon Instant Clones we are going to use the VMware Kerberos connector. So created and installed the necessary components configured the Conditional Access policies... and we have single sign on! Awesome! While explaining the flow to some people

A while ago I got asked by a customer how they can auto turn off the monitor when they move away from the workstation. These workstations are located on an Intensive Care unit so when they need to access these machines at night, they want the monitors "on time" limited to a minimum to not wake up the patient too much. First thought: Manually turning off these monitors with the power button? (Smile and wave. No, we can do better!) Second thought: Power settings and the monitor

Buffer Overflow: [a] condition at an interface under which more input can be placed into a buffer or data holding area than the capacity allocated, With al little creativity and bending we also see this in a VDI environment, I name this a User Overflow: [a] condition at an environment under which more users try to be placed into a pool than the capacity allocated, Of course with VMware Horizon you can make the pools dynamic in size but you will be limited by the available har

When using VMware Horizon, VMware Workspace One Access, TrueSSO and Imprivata you need to enable Kerberos Authentication within Imprivata. For this to work you also need to create a keytab file. In this blog I will explain how to create one and as a bonus.. can we use a custom account for this instead of the default created by the tool? Imprivata has a built in utility to facilitate this: ISXKerbUtil.exe. Normally you can find this utility in the OneSign Agent install directo

Awesome: VMware Verify (Intelligent HUB) is available within the Default Access Policy on al device platforms! Little back story: As stated in the following article: Workspace ONE Access: VMware Verify End-of-Life Migration Paths (88424) VMware Verify will reach end-of-support (EoS) and end-of-availability date (EoA) on October 31st, 2022. This gave us some headaches.. what are the alternatives? VMware Verify worked very well and gave us the basic features we requested… like