There are a few things to think about with regard to licensing  first, vSphere 4.1 now allows for DRS affinity so that VMs only move between certain hosts of a cluster.  I’m still waiting for a definite answer from my VMware friends but that should allow you to protect some VM’s and set their DRS Affinity to only the hosts that you own SRM CPUs for and still keep the full cluster for the unprotected VMs. Previously, VMware would recommend that you create a separate cluster for your “protected” VMs if they were a small subset of the whole.  Now with DRS Affinity, you can dictate that certain “protected” VMs only move between a subset of a cluster.  We’ll still have to wait and see the final ruling from VMware but I’m thinking that would work in the short-term for those in the per-CPU dilemma.

The second feature of the new licensing that I really like is the rolling average of VMs over the last twelve months.  What that translates to is that now I need to buy what my daily average of VMs protected would be over a 12 month period.  If I have certain points of the year where my VM count spikes, this average would be monitored by vCenter and alarm if I am going over my licensing limits.  However, I would only need the average number of protected VMs over the past year.  The system will continue to run after going over your limit but that’s definitely not something I would condone (Famous VMware SE saying: ethics don’t ship in the box people).

The per-vm licenses are sold in blocks of 25 and range from $1,250 to $11,250 depending on the product.  Per-vm licensing will be available for Chargeback, Appspeed, SRM, and, later this year, CapacityIQ.  You can find more information on VMware’s website here.

The last question I had was, “How do I know what my rolling average is for those licenses?”  The good news is that once you enter in a license key, the new license reporting manager in vSphere 4.1 will tell you what your rolling average is year-to-date.  Looks like someone was planning ahead.

The first is wondering how an admin can do more advanced things with the View Manager Server.  For instance: assign a default desktop out of a pool to a specific user or  listing orphaned desktops (users that no longer exist or have changed permissions and no longer have access to a desktop in a pool but still have one assigned to them) or cleaning up after removing a secondary View Manager server.  All of these items can be performed by a little-known command line utility included in View called vdmadmin.exe. vdmadmin.exe can do all of the things mentioned.  The tool is installed by default with view in the  C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware View\Server\bin directory.  You can read all of the details about the tool and all of the command options here .  "Why is this a command-line tool?" you ask.  When features are requested for the GUI, a programmer has to create and test the GUI options which takes a lot of time.  The product manager has to decide what features will make in into the released product and still keep it on time for release.  Sometime features or controls don’t make it but are still important.  A developer can write a command line executable and they are much easier to test as the command line either works or it does not.  The Quality Assurance process is much easier for command line utilities.

Another tool that’s good to know is sviconfig.exe.  It’s located on the vCenter server where you install composer in the C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware View Composer directory.  This tool allows you to unlock protected entities in vCenter.  For instance, if a user checks out a VM offline, it gets protected in vCenter so that an admin cannot accidentally delete it or power it on and make changes.  If the admin needs to make changes to it for some reason they can use the sviconfig tool to unlock that VM.

There’s also a few other topics that come up frequently.  Here are a few:

Can you protect View Desktops with Site Recovery Manager? Unfortunately, SRM is not "View aware" as yet.  The work is underway however.  Tommy Walker from VMware (one of the best @ VMware) has written a blueprint with EMC on how to accomplish this task (although experimental at this point).  It’s pretty interesting reading and I’m very hopeful that we’ll see native integration coming.  You can read the very detailed blueprint here (registration required).

What features do I get with thin client "x"? With the different number of options available for View Thin Clients there’s also a number of different thin client OS options.  Here is a great matrix of what features you get with each View client that is available.  Good information to know when picking out thin clients

How can I make location-aware desktops? This is a common question.  How can I make a specific thin client map a specific printer, etc based on the thin client location?  The answer: Client Information Variables.  Here’s a nice writeup on some basic scripting that can determine the variables and make appropriate decisions based on their values.

Can I use group policy to control the client or desktop agent? You bet.  You can find the administrative templates for group policy in the C:\Program Files\VMware\View Manager\Server\Extras\GroupPolicyFiles directory.  If you’re not too sure about using adm files, here’s a kb article from Microsoft on how to use and manage them.  There are 4 included with View: vdm-agent.adm to control the agent in the guest OS, vdm_client.adm to control the properties of the View client, vdm_server.adm to control the connection broker and vdm_common.adm for common View components across all of View.  A very detailed list of the options of each can be found in the View admin guide starting on page 176.

Here’s the What’s new section from the release notes:

• New Permission Required to Run a Recovery Plan
  SRM now distinguishes between permission to test a recovery plan and permission to run a recovery plan. After an SRM server is updated to this release, existing users of that server who had permission to run a recovery plan no longer have that permission. You must grant Run permission to these users after the update is complete. Until you do, no user can run a recovery plan. (Permission to test a recovery plan is unaffected by the update.)
• Full Support for RDM devices
  SRM now provides full support for virtual machines that use raw disk mapping (RDM) devices. This enables support of several new configurations, including Microsoft Cluster Server. (Virtual machine templates cannot use RDM devices.)
• Batch IP Property Customization
  This release of SRM includes a tool that allows you to specify IP properties (network settings) for any or all of the virtual machines in a recovery plan by editing a comma-separated-value (csv) file that the tool generates.
• Limits Checking and Enforcement
  A single SRM server can support up to 500 protected virtual machines and 150 protection groups. This release of SRM prevents you from exceeding those limits when you create a new protection group. If a configuration created in an earlier release of SRM exceeds these limits, SRM displays a warning, but allows the configuration to operate.
• Improved Support for Virtual Machines that Span Multiple Datastores.
  This release provides improved support for virtual machines whose disks reside on multiple datastores.
• Single Action to Reconfigure Protection for Multiple Virtual Machines
  This release introduces a Configure All button that applies existing inventory mappings to all virtual machines that have a status of Not Configured.
• Simplified Log Collection
  This release introduces new utilities that retrieve log and configuration files from the server and collect them in a compressed (zipped) folder on your desktop.
• Improved Acceptance of Non-ASCII Characters
  non-ASCII characters are now allowed in many fields during installation and operation.

You can download the update here .

You can find a link to the post and documentation here .

I plan on trying to set this up entirely in ESX in my lab.  I will report back on my results.