Vmware Virtual Environment Optimizations 300 Machines.

[Modder man]

First off I am very green in the management of a virtual environment. I apologize in advance for any ignorance. I was working a help desk role for this company until they fired their virtual environment manager. I was then moved into the role and have manged fairly well with day to day operations. We are now in the process of some big changes and I feel that I am sinking more than swimming. I have an overwhelming number of problems in different areas and am not really sure which direction to head with many of them.

We are currently trying to move from a static assignment of machines to doing floating pools. In preparation of this we have setup roaming profiles with group policy. For the most part this seems to be working pretty well. The problem started with Office pro plus 2013. I edited out image off office to allow shared licensing per the technet articles and it seems to be working. The problem is that the license token for machine is stored in the appdata/local folder, this is a problem because that license key is not actually stored long term then. as soon as the user logs out they lose their license and must license again on login. I need to somehow make this license token part of their roaming profile or something to that effect.

Another big complaint we have is that the machines are slow and just suck. Obviously that is not very constructive feedback. What i have gathered is that perhaps it is more of a perception thing than anything. People want the same experience as they have on a desktop and we don't quite have that. the virtual machines are running 2 cpu's and 2GB ram for basic office and web browsing use. I see no reason they shouldn't be capable of that. I think the users see some screen flicker or LAG as they switch windows or scroll up and down. I am wondering what could be done if anything to perhaps aide in this problem a little bit?

 

[moto316]

Is this for a vmware view environment? If so try giving persona management a shot instead of roaming profiles. Seems to have alot less headaches/corruption isses like roaming profiles does.

As far as the slow VM's can you give us a little more information on your environment? What storage, network, compute, etc are you running? For windows 7 64bit VDI machines I would start with 1vcpu 3-4GB RAM and adjust from there. For the screen lag double check what settings are configured on the pools for # of screens and resolution.

 

[Modder man]

Moto thank you much for your response.

This is for a vmware view environment, Unfortunately our environment is a bit outdated and we are still running ESXi 5.1 and View 5.0. I dont believe that is compatible with persona management?


We are running 7 HP gen8 esxi hosts, each with dual E5-2670 and 212GB ram
Each host has dual 10GbE nics paired for network access. I don't know a whole lot about our storage unfortunately aside from the fact that it is EMC and we have a mic of flash and spinning disk in a tiered setup.

Most user machines are limited to 2 displays at 1920x1200, perhaps this is just to much monitor for the machi9nes i am unsure?

 

[moto316]

persona management became available with view 5.0 so that option should be available to you. As far as the performance issues, do you have any monitoring software like vcenter operations manager or veeam one? If not i'd download the free version of veeam one to start out with and see what kind of statistics youre currently at - see if there's any memory pressure on your hosts or latency on your storage etc.

2 1920x1200 monitors is kind of standard nowadays in VDI, that's what we're running in our environment atleast so it shouldnt be a problem.