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Showing posts from September, 2015

Horizon View 6.1.1 and the Agent Unreachable Curse

One of my customers recently asked me to help them set up a stand-alone DR solution for their Unidesk + VMware View VDI.  We decided to try out the Unidesk LayerSync utility, to replicate their desktop configurations to the remote site, where we installed brand new View 6.1 connection servers.  There were a few small challenges to getting that running, but it's still in beta so that's perfectly understandable.  After we got the replication working, we stood up a few desktops as a test.  They booted up fine, all of the layer assembling as expected, and we were able to log into the consoles without trouble. We came across an issue though, Unidesk successfully added the desktops into the selected pool, but View reported them as being Agent Unreachable.  I went through the normal troubleshooting steps (testing name resolution, checking HKLM\Software\VMware, Inc.\VMware VDM\Agent\Configuration\ to make sure that the Broker setting is correct, verifying that  network flows are co

Finding a Specific MAC Address in vCenter

One of my customers found that they had an IP conflict on their network, but the network team was unavailable.  They asked me if I could help them track down the address, while waiting for help from the network team.  I don’t have nearly as much visibility into the environment as a network admin, but vCenter is aware of the vast majority of the servers in the environment and it has data about what MAC Address each one is using.  Of course, that data is buried under “Edit Settings” on each VM and, when you have thousands of VMs to look through, doing that process by hand would be a staggering effort.  So, I scripted it. This is a really simple script that takes a single parameter –MacAddress.  That address should be specified in colon separated format (like 00:50:56:00:00:01) and it accepts wildcards (so *00:01 is a fine search query).  The script first searches all VMs for the specified MAC Address, then moves on and searches all of the VMKernel interfaces on the ESXi hosts.  If it f