VMware View Composer is a component of VMware Horizon View (all editions).
Horizon View Composer offers features such as storage reduction, improved OS management and rapid desktop deployment.
VMware Horizon View Composer uses linked clones to provide a 50% to 90% reduction in storage requirements for virtual desktops. If View Composer is not used, 100's or 1,000's of desktops 25GB+ in size would exhaust expensive SAN storage.
Horizon View Composer does this by using creating linked clones from a parent disk, instead of full clones. This creates what is known as a "diff disk" of the differences between the parent disk and itself once the virtual desktop is powered on. Without the parent disk the linked clones will not work.
The different could be instead of each desktop requiring 25GB+ of space each, the linked clone may only be around 5GB in size. This varies depending on the amount of changes in the desktop during the day, memory/pagefile size and also if the virtual desktop is refresh or deleted after each logoff.
With the release of ESXi 4.1 the bnx2i driver is included. The bnx2i drivers is loaded after bnx2 (the driver for the Broadcom NetXtreme II NICs).
bnx2i is the driver that enables the hardware dependant iSCSI initiator functionality of the broadcom 5709 single/dual/quad port NICs (including internal NICs in servers such as the Dell R710).
Welcome to the vSphere 5.1 How To Series
Taking you from zero to hero!
VMware vSphere 5.1 Release Announced
Firstly, what is VMware Horizon? It's a collection of products which covers both virtual desktops, physical desktops, RDS hosts and virtual applications.
There are 3 editions of VMware Horizon;
Standard, Advanced and Enterprise (Feature comparison: http://www.vmware.com/products/horizon-view/compare.html)
Horizon View Standard simply provides virtual desktops via View like it always used to. However it also includes View Composer, licensing for vSphere/vCenter Desktop and ThinApp (like was the case with the old View Premier edition).
The Advanced and Enterprise editions add features such as RDS hosted applications, VSAN and vCOps monitoring amongst other features such as physical desktop image management (aka Mirage).
Right i'm going to put this down in ink, or even better electronic, as its happened twice and I forgot what I did to fix it the first time...
Essentially the issue is a black screen (sometimes with coloured lines/dots) when booting Windows 7.
This happens before the login screen and hangs there indefintley.
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