It’s official, VMware vSphere 7 is here. VMware has put together tons of content for the launch of the new version.
First and foremost, check out their blog at https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/vsphere-7. This page will have tons of information on the launch and will host some important materials in one place for you to access.
I’ll be posting more information when available!
Lately, I’ve been playing with video editing and encoding as a new hobby. It requires a powerful system for the production process for both editing, and encoding. While CPU power isn’t necessarily important, the CPU instruction sets and your GPU play a key part with editing and encoding.
For the last few weeks, I’ve been attempting to use my desktop rig with a couple of Nvidia GeForce cards and I’ve been struggling to be able to edit in real time, as well as encode completed video productions in a reasonable amount of time.
Well, there’s a happy ending to this story, my Nvidia Grid K1 and VDI environment saved the day!
As part of my demo and homelab, I have an HPE ML310e Gen8 v2, with an Nvidia Grid K1 card. This setup is backed with an HPE MSA 2040 SAN for main storage and a Synology DS1813+ for backup and video storage.
On this rig, I’m running VMware Horizon 7.11 and connect to it via a 10ZiG 5948qv Zero Client.
It’s a beautiful desktop replacement as it’s silent, provides a desktop backed with a Intel Xeon Processor, and a high performance GPU.
For software, I’ve been using Cyberlink’s PowerDirector software. I’ve used this in the past for screen recording, as well as editing videos I use for demos.
On my physical desktop rig, even with two GPUs it struggles to allow me to preview in realtime the edits I’ve done on a project. The preview window is jolty with loss frames, and it’s hard to know what you’re doing. Also, when producing and encoding a finalized video project, it would take forever to complete even a small 5 minute video at 1080p.
When I first loaded this up on my VDI environment, the software instantly detected the Nvidia GRID card, and asked me if it could use it. From that point on the preview window was fluid, transitions and add-ins were rendered on the fly during previewing, and the final production encoding was literally over 20 times faster using 1080p. Keep in mind this VM only has one Nvidia K180q profile attached to it, so I’m only using less than 25% of the cards full capability.
There’s some other benefits that can be realized when doing video editing and encoding inside of a VDI environment:
This is just another great use case scenario for VDI. Whether it’s for the video professional, or a large organization.
It’s finally here! VMware has released the alpha (test) of the vSphere Mobile Client for Android Devices. This will allow you to manage your vSphere instance via your Android mobile device.
Some of you may remember the vSphere Mobile Watchlist app for android. It was great because it allowed you to manage your vSphere environment (and I still use it), but one day it was abruptly removed from the Google Play store and no longer available. However, those that had it installed could keep using it.
This new version of the vSphere Mobile Client is only available for Android as of the time of this post.
The VMware fling is here: https://labs.vmware.com/flings/vsphere-mobile-client
While there is a tarball download, you’ll actually want to forget that and follow the instructions for a proper install. The tarball is only needed if you want to deploy the notification service.
First, you need to join the alpha testers group here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/vsphere-mobile-client/join
Second, you need to opt-in to the Google Play Test app here: https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.vmware.vsphere.cloudsmith
Then simply follow the instruction after the opt-in and download it for your device.
The app is a slick but simple one. Since it’s alpha, functionality is limited, but gives you the ability shutdown, restart, view performance and do a couple other things.
Shortly after using the app, I noticed that I couldn’t log in subsequent tries due to an “incorrect user name or password”. I know I was typing it right, so I’m assuming this is a bug. To resolve this, you have to delete the app cache, then you will be able to log in properly.
Unfortunately the app also doesn’t allow you to save your password, like the previous watchlist app.
See below for some screenshots:
All in all, it’s pretty exciting that VMware is finally working on an official mobile app. I still use watchlist almost daily, so I see tremendous value in this!
Leave a comment below and let me know what you think of the new app!
Since I’ve installed and configured my Nvidia GRID K1, I’ve been wanting to do a graphics quality demo video. I finally had some time to put a demo together.
I wanted to highlight what type of graphics can be achieved in a VDI environment. Even using an old Nvidia GRID K1 card, we can still achieve amazing graphical performance in a virtual desktop environment.
This demo outlines 3D accelerated graphics provided by vGPU.
Please see below for the video:
We’ve all been in the situation where we need to install a driver, vib file, or check “esxtop”. Many advanced administration tasks on ESXi need to be performed via shell access, and to do this you either need a console on the physical ESXi host, an SSH session, or use the Remote vCLI.
In this blog post, I’m going to be providing a quick “How to” enable SSH on an ESXi host in your VMware Infrastructure using the vCenter flash-based web administration interface. This will allow you to perform the tasks above, as well as use the “esxcli” command which is frequently needed.
This method should work on all vCenter versions up to 6.7, and ESXi versions up to 6.7.
This method can also be used to stop, restart, and change the startup policy to enable or disable SSH starting on boot.
Congratulations, you can now SSH in to your ESXi host!