VCAP-DTA – Objective 5.2 – Deploy ThinApp Applications using Active Directory

Once we have a repository configured for our ThinApps, we next continue the groundwork by preparing Active Directory. We can then harness Active Directory groups to control access to the ThinApps.

• Create an Active Directory OU for ThinApp packages or groups – From your domain server, go to Administrative Tools and select Active Directory Users and Groups. From wherever in the hierarchy the exam asks you to, right click and select New, Organizational Unit. Give the OU a name and click OK.
• Add users to individual ThinApp package OU or groups – Again not really a View skill as such, just some basic AD administration. Now you created your OU(s) as above, to create a user right click on the ThinApp OU, click New, User, fill out the appropriate details, click Next, enter password information and click Next and Finish. To add a group, right click on the appropriate OU, click New, Group, give the group a name and select the type and click OK. To add users to an existing group, double click the group, click Members, Add and enter the user names and click Check Names. Click OK twice.
• Leverage AD GPOs for individual ThinApp MSIs – Group Policy can be used to publish an existing ThinApp MSI without the need for a repository, or in parallel. To configure this, go to Administrative Tools, Group Policy Management. Right click the OU in which you would like to create the GPO. Select Create a GPO in this domain, and link it here (for a new GPO, or select Link an existing GPO if asked).Name the GPO and click OK. Once the GPO is created, right click on it and select Edit. In either Computer Configuration or User Configuration select Policies and then Software Settings. Right click on Software Installation and select New, Package. Browse to the network location of the MSI and select the MSI and then Open. Accept the defaults to Assign the package to a user or computer or click Advanced for further settings. Click OK. If you select Advanced, use the tabs across the top to make changes as appropriate and click OK. You may need to run gpupdate.exe to refresh Group Policy.
• Create and maintain a ThinApp login script – The ThinReg utility can be used in an existing login script to deploy ThinApps to users. For example, in the NETLOGON share, you can add a line or lines into the logon script to invoke thinreg.exe. In it’s simplest form, just add the line thinreg.exe \\server\share\application.exe /Q. The /Q switch just runs the command silently. It may well crop up as a specific requirement on the exam.

VCAP-DTA – Objective 3.1 – Configure Pool Storage for Optimal Performance

So this objective sees us moving into section 3 which is entitled “Deploy, Manage, and Customize Pool Implementations”. This objective deals with how we use storage tiers for different virtual disks and use cases, and the sub settings within them. So as usual, let’s run through the skills and abilities for this objective :-

• Implement storage tiers – When creating a Composer based pool, select the option in the Storage Optimization wizard screen to separate out disks to different datastores. Depending on the exam scenario, you may be asked to separate the Persistent Disks and/or the Replica Disks. Depending on what you select, when you click Next you will get a differing set of options. Assuming you select both, on the vCenter Settings screen, use options 6, 7 and optionally 8  to choose which datastores are used and for which purpose. Once you have completed your choices, complete the wizard out to create the pool.
• Optimize placement of replica virtual machine – The replica disk is the disk that gets hammered for read read requests from users, so you will be asked to place this on high performance storage, most likely SSD. Using the steps detailed above, use the vCenter Settings screen of the pool wizard to choose a high performance datastore for the replica disk. The diagram below illustrates this point.

• Configure disposable files and persistent disks – Again this is selected in the pool wizard. You can see from above that there is a View Composer Disks section. This defines how disposable (so think temp files) and persistent disk (user profile) are handled. So for the Persistent Disk, you can select a disk size and drive letter and to redirect the user profile to this disk. The same goes for the Disposable Disk, select the size, whether or not to redirect and which drive letter to use. See below for an illustration of this.

• Configure and optimize storage for floating or dedicated pools – This is pretty much covered by the first section, Implement Storage Tiers.
• Configure overcommit settings –  This setting is used when using View Composer. The purpose of overcommit is to allow more disks to be created than physical space exists on the datastore. This is because the disks are sparse disks  on the datastore. The choices for overcommit are None (x0), Conservative (x4, default), Moderate (x7) and Aggressive (x15).  Select the datastore and choose the level of overcommitment from the drop down menu. These choices are only available for OS and Persistent Disks. See below for an example of the dialog.

• Determine implications of using local or shared storage – So in most cases you will be looking to use shared storage, but there may be occasions (and exam scenarios) where you will be asked to use local storage (or it’s use is implied by the question). Bear the following in mind from the View Administration Guide :-
  • You cannot load-balance virtual machines across a resource pool. For example, you cannot use the View Composer rebalance operation with linked-clones that are stored on datastores
  • You cannot use VMware High Availability
  • You cannot use the vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS)
  • You cannot store a View Composer replica and linked clones on separate datastores if the replica is on a local datastore
  • When you store linked clones on datastores, VMware strongly recommends that you store the replica on the same volume as the linked clones. Although it is possible to store linked clones on local datastores and the replica on a shared datastore if all ESXi hosts in the cluster can access the replica, VMware does not recommend this configuration
  • If you use floating assignments and perform regular refresh and delete operations, you can successfully deploy linked clones to local datastores.
• Configure View Storage Accelerator and regeneration cycle – The View Storage Accelerator is also known as the Content Based Read Cache (CBRC) on the ESXi host. This is especially useful as common read based requests are cached into host RAM and is useful for use cases such as desktop boot storms. Configuration is pretty simple – in the pool creation wizard you make your choices in the Advanced Storage Options screen. Check the box to Use View Storage Accelerator, choose between OS Disks  or OS and Persistent Disks. The default is OS disks as this is the usual use case. You also have the option to set a default value for Regenerate Storage Accelerator after n days. This basically creates new indexes of the disks and stores them in the digest file for each VM. It’s also worth noting you can configure blackout periods when storage accelerator regeneration will not be run. An obvious example is to suspend this during backups. You may be asked this in the exam. See below for an example.

VCAP-DTA – Objective 2.5 – Configure Location Based Printing

So we come to the final objective in section 2, configuring location based printing. In essence, this is harnessing the abilities of ThinPrint to enable printing from the View environment, using physical printers located nearby to the end users. There are three measured skills and abilities in this section, and are listed below.

• Configure location-based printing using a Group Policy Object – To start with, you need to register the ThinPrint DLL on an Active Directory server to enable the functionality within MMC. To do this, go to any of your Connection Servers and find the file TPVMGPoACmap.dll. There are both 32 bit and 64 bit versions. This file is located under C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware View\Server\extras\GroupPolicyFiles\ThinPrint.
  • Copy TPVMGPoACmap.dll to the Active Directory server (choose the appropriate version, 32/64 bit)
  • Register the DLL by running regsvr32 “C:\TPVMGPoACmap.dll” from a command prompt
  • Start Group Policy Management from Administrative Tools on an Active Directory server
  • Either create and link a new GPO or edit an existing one (depending on the exam scenario)
  • Go to Computer Configuration, Policies, Software Settings and Configure AutoConnect Map Additional Printers.
  • Ensure to select the Enabled radio button to start entering entries into the mapping table. Remember that selecting Disable without saving first will delete all of your printers!
  • Printer mappings can be used to map printers depending on certain rules, as per the example dialog below

• You will also need to know the syntax of each column for settings to become effective :-
  • IP Range – 10.10.1.1-10.10.1.50, for example. Or you can use an entire subnet, e.g. 10.10.1.0/24. You can also use an asterisk as a wildcard.
  • Client Name – So in the above example, PC01 maps a specific printer “Printer2”, again an asterisk is used as a wildcard.
  • Mac Address – Use the hyphenated format 01-02-03-04-05-CD for Windows and colons for Linux clients, so 01:02:03:04:05:CD.
  • User/Group – Map a specific printer to a specific user or group, such as jsmith or Finance.
  • Printer Name – This is the printer name as shown in the View session. The name doesn’t have to match names on the client system.
  • Printer Driver – Simply the printer driver name in Windows. This driver must be installed on the desktop.
  • IP Port/ThinPrint Port – the IP address of a networked printer to connect to, must be prepended with “IP”, so IP_192.168.0.50 for example.
  • Default – Whether this printer is the default printer.