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Today I watched the latest of the VMware View Bootcamp series as I did last year with the initial series this is a a summary of the key points of the presentation. I definitely recommend watching the entire video from the Bootcamp series for full details, very nice job. Today's video released by VMware is called 'Troubleshooting VMware View'.
Speaker – Matt Coppinger, Lead Architect, Global Center of Excellence
Learn how to troubleshoot VMware View™ from some of the best field trouble shooters
Identify the failure domain and determine issue root causes
The agenda reviewed by the speaker is this:
One of the key takeaways from this video and one of the reasons I recommend it is the detailed information provider by the speaker on the specific log messages (for example in the Connection Broker logs) to look for, what they mean and how to use them to determine what the issue maybe.
The speaker goes through in a good level of detail the various types of issues you may be presented with, what the common issues are and how to find the problem. The speaker refers to these areas as Domains, those discussed being 'Failure to Communicate', Desktops not Available', 'Broken Connection Broker' and 'Desktop Performance'.
Failure to Communicate
In this topic the author review some of the common issues like, can't connect, black screens and poor quality. For troubleshooting the best places to start is the View Admin Dashboard and the Event Database and the Connection Broker Logs. There was some excellent detail on where to look and what is the cause.
Desktops Not Available
For this type of issue common issues could be desktops are not available, provisioning problems or agent/broker communication issues. It was stressed here to make sure you understand what a successful connection looks like in order to troubleshoot properly. Some of the best places to look are again the Connection Broker Logs and the Event Database.
Broken Connection Broker
For Connection Broker issues some of the common issues are, unable to connect to vCenter, composer issues and Java Messaging Service (JMS) connectivity issues. In addition to the connection broker logs you can also start looking on the Windows side in the Windows Event Logs. The speaker also went into a lot of detail discussing another possible issue with the ADAM ( Active Directory Application Mode ) database replication as well as JMS connectivity issues.
Desktop Performance
For Desktop performance the area of troubleshooting shifts from the View components to most likely the vSphere environment. Areas to look at include Storage Performance, vSphere CPU and Memory Utilization. The speaker discusses various recommendations and best practices for performance tuning and configuration.
Note - I would like to thank the speaker for mentioning Liquidware Lab's Stratusphere product as a third-party tool for Performance Monitoring and Analysis.
Summary
The other big takeaway from this presentation is the overall key steps and approach for troubleshooting a VMware View issues. Those include:
Check out the full video, its highly recommended.
http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/desktop/view/bootcamp/video_10
Pete Del Rey (vExpert)
Technology Evangelist
Liquidware Labs
