I was in the process of getting vRealize for Horizon configured, and as I was going through the broker agent configuration for the life of me I couldn’t get the eventdb portion to work. Everytime i entered in the user name and password, I would receive the following error. FAILED (Format of the initialization string does not conform to specification starting at index 88.)

I knew it wasn’t a password issue as I was able to logon to SQL Manager with no issue, and the Horizon View EventsDB was working fine, so I went on a google search to try to hunt through logs. SQL Server was …

I use a customized version of http://www.virtu-al.net/vcheck-pluginsheaders/vcheck/ by Alan Renouf to connect to multiple servers. However a coworker of mine was trying to run it, and the script would only return data from the 2nd vCenter we were connecting to.

Doing some troubleshooting we noticed their DefaultVIServerMode was set to single. This means that only a single servers connection will occur at once. Changing this setting is very easy, there are 3 scopes, but only one really needs to be set. You can review the 3 scope options …

I had a need to enable CPU and Memory hotadd to many virtual machines prior to a template being updated, doing some research there is no easy way, however there are some functions out there to do it. You can copy and paste each function into a powershell window and then run the associated command.

1Enable-MemHotAdd $ServerName
2Disable-MemHotAdd $ServerName
3Enable-vCPUHotAdd $ServerName
4Disable-vCPUHotAdd $ServerName

Enable Memory HotAdd

1Function Enable-MemHotAdd($vm){
2$vmview = Get-vm $vm | Get-View
3$vmConfigSpec = New-Object VMware.Vim.VirtualMachineConfigSpec
4$extra = New-Object …

So going though v7, v8 and v9 of the certificate guides I continued to have some issues getting the certificate to work and the steps never included ways to add subject alternative names. Upon further research I have identified a good step by step to replace the trend micro DSM certificate and include subject alternative names using a Microsoft certificate authority.

1. Stop the “Trend Micro Deep Security Manager” service
2. If not already created, create a folder on the root of C:\ called “certs”
3. Go to C:\Program Files\Trend Micro\Deep Security Manager and create a new folder called …

I am honored to have been accepted as a Cisco Champion for 2015! I guess this means I will continue and post to expand content on Cisco UCS and Cisco IronPort.

So after recently implementing directory sync i wanted to make sure any new groups were properly set up in active directory.

Unfortunately i was unable to find any commands so thanks to MS Support I was able to find a way to identify these. You would think it would be under Get-DistributionGroup but it is actually under Get-MSolGroup. After connecting via remote powershell you can run the below command to see all that are not synced.

So I have been working in a few situations where i have wanted to use Horizon 6 published (RDS) applications but having to either launch the Horizon View client within a VDI or have users be forced to logon again has been a deal breaker.

Upon further research i finally found the right combination of settings to allow users to launch the RDS Hosted Applications via a Shortcut and automatically login to the view client making this process seamless.

Chrome depreciated one of the features that allowed these popups to work, here is a temporary workaround to get it working.

Download the Chrome Policy Plugin here

1. Open the zip file you just downloaded and locate the .ADM file that best matches your system:
2. Extract the .ADM file to any folder on your hard drive
3. Go to Start > Run, and run gpedit.msc
4. Right-click Local Computer Policy > Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates, and select Add/Remove Templates:
5. Add the adm template that you saved to disk earlier:

• You should now see the template underneath a Google > Google …

As I was upgrading my VDP-A environment from 5.5 to 5.8 the upgrade failed due to the following error.

“Please make sure you have at least 20GB for repo, 10GB for var, and 1GB for root partition.”

Upon further research there seems to be an issue from 5.5.1 and 5.5.5 appliances with the /space partition filling up due to PostGres events. The issue can be resolving by installing the following VDP patch (vdp_patch-5.5.5.190.)

So upon trying to install .Net 3.5 on a new server today it would not allow me to, it kept telling me the source files were unavailable even after pointing to source directly to multiple ISO’s and copied the files locally.

Upon further research I stumbled across this microsoft KB article and used it to ultimately find my fix. KB2734782

Here are the full steps I followed to get .NET installed.

1. Open gpedit.msc to modify your local group policy.

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