Eric Monjoin
Staff Consulting Architect but also pilot, spending time in front of my computer or flying in the air...

Category: App Volumes

App Volumes Apps On Demand – Certificate Issue

Horizon Suite 2212 is GA since last week and of course I already upgraded all my lab with this new release.

I was particularly interested by the Application on Demand so directly manage App Volumes application on RDS with all entitlement done within the Horizon Console.

The principle consist of adding App Volumes server in Horizon and then assign it to an “Automated” farm.

Now when you add you App Volumes Server into Horizon, you’ll certainly need to import App Volumes certificates into the “Trusted Root Certification Authorities” folder and then restart Horizon Services on all you Connection Servers.

Now even if doing that, you can encounter the following issue, with Enterprise signed certificate :

I had this issue on my lab, so to get it solved, I had to generate a new certificate for my App Volumes server using a new Template.

This is how to do it ….

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PowerShell : Automatically Expand Writable Volumes

One of my customer raised an issue about managing writable volumes as they are mainly used by developers who are unable to restrain their desires to fill disk with tons of data and can’t do some clean up 🙂

The problem of course is that the writable volume grow up to no free space and unfortunately the user is not aware of that as the “ReportSystemFreeSpace” Reg Key works only for App Volumes 2.x and not App Volumes 4.x

The following script can be used manually or integrated with Task Scheduler but requires App Volumes Server 2206 (4.7) to handle “requested_mb” parameters. You can use it with previous version but you don’t know if a request to expand disk was previously initiated.

Disclaimer : The script it self is not supported by me or VMware so use it at your own risk however it’s using official VMware API for App Volumes, and thank to Chris Halstead as his initial script helped me a lot (https://github.com/chrisdhalstead/appvolumes-expand-wv)

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App Volumes 4.5 – Error “Failed to connect Manager Service..” when registering additional App Volume Manager servers

During the installation of App Volume 2111 (4.5), if you try to register additional App Volumes Managers, you would certainly failed with the following error message :

And if you look at in the nginx.log, you would see the following error :

2021/12/06 22:15:08 [info] 5200#5264: *72 client sent plain HTTP request to HTTPS port while reading client request headers, client: 192.168.0.67, server: 0.0.0.0, request: "POST /cv_api/sessions HTTP/1.1", host: "appvol4mgr01.domain.dom:443"
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AppVolumes 2103 (4.4) Tools – Off line packaging for both AppVolumes On-Prem and on Azure

One of the great update from AppVolumes 2103 (aka 4.4) is now you can install only App Volumes Tools and package applications offline from a simple VM on VMware Workstation for example and produce the same package for App Volumes on Prem (.vmdk file) and for App Volumes on Azure (.vhd files). So exactly the same package for both environment.

So let me describe how I created my “Capture and Build” VM, how to capture and import your applications….

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New Release of Horizon Enterprise 2103 and Unified Access Gateway 2103

What’s New?

  • Horizon Server
    • Added support for “Global Access Group”
    • Added support for open source database — “PostgresSQL”
    • Added support for untrusted domain
    • Pegged unabated growth of event database
    • Ability to pre-assign computer names to instant clone desktops
    • Delivered View API parity REST APIs
  • Horizon Agents & Clients
    • Teams offload Mac client
    • USB redirection for HTML Access & Chrome client
    • Pen redirection iOS & Android
    • HEVC 444 Intel GPU Linux client
    • Bandwidth control for integrated printing
    • Serial port improvements, auto mapping, ID passing
    • Agent hot patch via MSP
    • Expose HCA, H.264/H.265 enablement and networking client settings to registry and GPO template
    • Drop 32-bit support Windows agent, Linux agent and client
  • App Volumes
    • Support for Windows 10 Enterprise multi-session on Horizon Cloud on Azure
    • App Volumes Command-Line Capture Program for working with App Volumes and MSIX formatted VMDK and VHD packages
    • Global option to allow the same packages to work across both VDI/RDSH regardless of the packaging OS used
  • Dynamic Environment Manager
    • Replication of the Script folder in SyncTool
    • Simplification of computer environment configuration
    • Support for late arrival of system environment variables in agent configuration for computer environment settings
    • Improvements in default printer logic to roam default printer settings for redirected printers

App Volumes, load balancer health check

I recently had an issue with one of my App Volumes server: even if my server was down in an App Volumes point of view (connection lost the database), my Kemp load balancer see it up and running because: the web interface was up and favicon.ico was also available.

The template for App Volumes (part of Horizon 7 Template) is, in my opinion not complete and it missed the right way to configure health check

So the right way to configure load balancer ‘s health check is the following :

For Kemp :