Category Archives: Virtualization

How to enable VMware Horizon View Client to support multi-monitor connection with RDP?

I have recently encountered this where my customer needed to connect to virtual desktops using RDP. The requirement is that the session had to support multi-monitors on the end device. He had all the right settings in the View Pool, but on View client, it was not showing the option for multimonitor. If the display protocol was changed to PCoIP, the multimonitor option would appear.

So, the requirement is that on both the View Desktop and View Client, at least RDP 7.0 must be installed. Details here.

You can find RDC 7.0 for Windows XP & Vista here. Windows 7 comes with 7.0 out of the box.

To validate if you already have RDC 7.0, one simple way is to launch mstsc.exe, and see if the “Display” tab has the check box to.

This is an example where multimonitor support is not available.

mstsc_no_multimonitor

 

The next image is MSTSC that has been upgraded to RDP 7.0 on the same Vista Computer. The option will be enabled if Windows detects more than one monitor. In this case, there’s only one monitor, and so the option is greyed out.

MSTSC with Multimonitor

P2V migration servers with “small files syndrome”

The past weekend I was helping a customer perform several P2V of physical servers to VMware virtual machines. Those were critical applications with small downtime window.

Generally P2V are pretty straightforward and easy to do. Given enough time, any x86 physical workloads can be migrated. In the ones I just did, all I had was 4 hours each. On the surface, 4 hours for about 120GB worth of data was achievable over 1Gbps networks. For these, we needed a lot more time. We did a migration on one of the machines which had no issues with a tight window, it took 16hrs!

The cause, nearly 1 million small files!! Small files are the bane of storage, which are a pain to copy.

We had to use different techniques for the P2V. Block based copying was not an option, and so it would have to be just regular file based copying.

The solution? P2V the OS disk only, then copy the other drives using FastCopy.

FastCopy was much more efficient that standard file copying utilities. It is known to be very successful in copying small files, and it’s true! Even for copying over the network! Though it’s still far from being as fast as block copy, but it was certainly faster than leaving it to regular copy/migration means.