Remko Weijnen's Blog (Remko's Blog)

About Virtualization, VDI, SBC, Application Compatibility and anything else I feel like


1,985 views

Recently support for NPAPI has been removed from Google Chrome. While understandable from a security point of view it does mean that some plugins no longer work.

A good example is VMware’s Client Integration Plugin where we’ve lost the ability to upload an ovf template. While VMware has published a fix for vCenter (see this kb), it has not been fixed for vCloud Director:

The attempted operation cannot be performed using this browser. Re-try using an alternative method:

- Use the VMware OVF Tool to perform the operation. You can download the OVF Tool and its User Guide from the OVF Tool product page at https://www.vmware.com/support/developer/ovf/.
- Use a browser and platform combination that is supported by vCloud Director for this operation. For the supported browser and platform combinations, see the Release Notes for this version of vCloud Director.

Read the rest of this entry »

1,693 views

In versions prior to 6.0 VMware supplied the VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance) as an OVF template that could be imported directly.

Starting with version 6.0 the installation process has changed and now consist of an .iso file containing a custom, HTML based, installer. Vladan Seget has a nice blog post where he describes the installation.

This installation process is annoying, it needs a separate client (Windows) machine to run the installer on, requires the Client Integration Plugin (which doesn’t appear to run well on chrome now that support for npapi/dpapi has been removed):
Please install the Client Integration Plugin 6.0 provided in the vCenter Server Appliance ISO image (requires quitting the browser)

But even worse is that we cannot import VCSA 6.0 in vCloud Director. Even converting the OVF inside the iso file doesn’t help because vCloud directory lacks support for Deployment Options.

Read the rest of this entry »

96,721 views

imageI’m using Windows 10 with BootCamp on my MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2015). Overall I’m pretty happy with the hardware but Apple seems to limit functionality when running under Windows.

A good example is the trackpad which simply doesn’t operate as smoothly as under Mac OSX. This isn’t because Windows is a less good Operating System, it’s simply Apple supplying drivers and support software this is less good.

For the trackpad I found a good solution with Trackpad++ which enables 2, 3- and 4-finger gestures and improves scrolling.

Display driver stopped responding and has recoveredThe AMD Display Drivers as supplied with BootCamp are instable leading to “Display driver stopped responding” messages.

Read the rest of this entry »

  • 439 Comments
  • Filed under: Apple, BootCamp
  • 1,655 views

    ShareFileLogoThe Citrix ShareFile Sync application is quite limited in functionality, one of those limitations is that you can only synchronize to a single (one) local folder.

    As Helge Klein wrote in his excellent article "Configuring Citrix ShareFile Sync from PowerShell" this is simply a GUI restriction and not a restriction in the actual ShareFile sync engine.

    Helge describes that you can easily do this in PowerShell with the following example:

    While the command was accepted, nothing was synchronized.

    Read the rest of this entry »

    734 views

    Twitter has opened access to Analytics for all users. However when you use an Ad Blocker, like Adblock Plus, you’ll get the following error:

    A problem occurred while loading the page. To use this site, you need to disable AdBlock or any other ads-blocking extension you are using, or customize it to show ads on this site

    For Adblock Plus you can fix this by adding a filter: go to Filter Preferences and on the "Custom filters" tab add a new filter within a filter group (or create a filter group for this rule).

    Use this as a filter rule:

    @@||ads.twitter.com/stylesheets/ads-allow.css

    SNAGHTMLea2974c

    And don’t forget to Enable the rule!

    EDIT: Twitter user @Ertraeglichkeit mentioned a different method:

    Read the rest of this entry »

    12,343 views

    Ini File IconThis morning Aaron Parker was wondering if Hash Tables could be used to work with ini files:

    Aaron Parker | @stealthpuppy | @remkoweijnen @msh_dave need to see if this approach works for editing INI files

    I thought it was a great idea because in Hash Tables you can use the . operator to get or set a Hash Table entry. But I wondered what to do with sections in ini files. Then I got the idea to use nested Hash Tables for that.

    The result is two functions, one to read an ini file into a nested Hash Table and one function to write it back to an ini file.

    Read the rest of this entry »

  • 2 Comments
  • Filed under: PowerShell
  • 2,054 views

    In a PowerShell script I needed to sort a hash table by byte value (not alphabetically, lowercase parameters will be listed after uppercase ones). An example for this requirement is the Amazon Product Advertising API.

    Consider the following hashtable as an example:

    If we use the Sort-Object to order the list (note that we need to use the GetEnumerator method):

    We will get the following result:

    If you use the -CaseSensitive switch the resulting order will remain the same.

    Read the rest of this entry »

  • 4 Comments
  • Filed under: PowerShell
  • 9,031 views

    To get the best performance out of Virtual Desktops it is essential that the power configuration in the system BIOS and the HyperVisor are configured for maximum performance.

    Many people have blogged about the importance of these settings like, Andrew Wood, Helge Klein and Didier Van Hoye. So I will not go into details again.

    But how do you check from a Virtual Machine if you are actually running at full clock speed or not?

    I have written a PowerShell script to do just that (requires at least PowerShell v3).

    Here are some screenshots:

    Running with "High Performance profile":

    CPU Clock Speed with d"High Performanced" Power Profile

    Running with "Balanced" power profile:

    CPU Clock Speed with High Performance Balanced Profile

    Read the rest of this entry »

  • 2 Comments
  • Filed under: PowerShell
  • 1,818 views

    System Center Operations Manager LogoIn a SCOM Management Pack Custom Properties can be used for Alert Description and Notification as described in this blog by Kevin Holman.

    In my case I wanted to add the Display Name and the Performance Counter Value in a Performance Threshold Monitor. In XML it would look this this:

    But how to add these parameters when using the System Center 2012 Visual Studio Authoring Extensions?

    Read the rest of this entry »

    2,763 views

    Sophos UTM IconI am currently implementing Sophos UTM and I quite like this solution. It is free up for home usage and can easily be installed on a hypervisor.

    I wanted to scan encrypted traffic (ssl) as well so I activated the "Decrypt and scan" option:

    image

    When testing this on one of my iPad’s I noticed that the App Store didn’t work properly anymore.

    When I tried to update applications I got the following error: "Cannot connect to iTunes Store". Additionally when I searched for Apps the search would return no results.

    Read the rest of this entry »

    Blogroll


    Categories


    Archives