Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Problem with VMWare view v5 and Vsphere hardware v8

I have been working with EMC support for a few months now trying to figure out a strange issue that we have been having. Our vmware View v5 windows 7 x64 desktops have been experiencing sporadic and strange issues. Sometimes the dual monitors will drop to a single monitor and the resolution on that one monitor will drop from 1680 x 1050 to 1024 x 768. The quick fix is to disconnect from the session and reconnect. Setting a screensaver to lock, or UAC popups have cause this issue to surface as well, however many times is just randomly happens.

Vmware Support has identified the issue and they said for now to stick to hardware v7 and the vm tools associated with that version in order to avoid this situation.

In summary, if you are using Vmware View 5 on Vsphere, do NOT upgrade your virtual hardware to v8 until this issue has been resolved.


------------UPDATE---------------------------------
If you did upgrade to V8 already, here are the steps provided by VMWare support to roll back to hardware V7.

Downgrading the virtual machine hardware version:

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1028019

VMware vCenter Converter Standalone 5.0

Document: https://www.vmware.com/pdf/convsa_50_guide.pdf

Download link: https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/info/slug/infrastructure_operations_management/vmware_vcenter_converter_standalone/5_0

The external link below can be referenced, the outlined steps can be used, but, ensure that you are selecting Virtual Hardware version 7.

- Once the VM has been converted (virtual to virtual aka V2V), please uninstall VMware tools & View Agent

- Power off VM and then power back on

- Install VMware tools first reboot and then View agent

- Power off the VM and then power on.

http://www.techhead.co.uk/vmware-esx-how-to-downgrade-a-vms-vm-versionhw-level-from-7-4-0-to-4-3-x