2023

After recently upgrading the VMware Horizon Connection Servers in a VDI environment I am new to managing, end users complained that they could no longer access their virtual desktops. They stated that when they connected via the VMware Horizon Client for Windows, they received an HTTP 421 error similar to the screenshot below. VMware Horizon Windows Client Showing HTTP 421 Error Honestly, I had never heard of the HTTP 421 error code, so I had to look it up.

I recently had the opportunity to begin supporting multiple VMware Horizon 8 virtual desktop environments. Knowing that I wasn’t familiar with the products, I set out to deploy a complete environment in my home lab. This blog post is the first of hopefully several that will walk through the deployment and configuration of the various VMware Horizon and Workspace ONE components. Within this post, I walk through deploying my first Horizon 8 Connection Server and a Connection Server Replica.

On July 26, 2023, the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) released the first VMware vSphere 7.0 STIG update. This update includes several minor updates to the checks and fixes across the ESXi, VAMI, vCA EAM, vCA Lookup Service, vCA Photon OS, vCA PostgreSQL, vCA STS, vCA UI, vCenter, and Virtual Machine STIGs.

During recent testing that I was completing within my home lab, I was repeatedly creating and decommissioning VMware vSAN configurations within a single cluster. The first time I completed this process, I was decommissioning a VMware vSAN OSA configuration prior to creating a new VMware vSAN ESA configuration on the cluster. When I went through the process and reached the portion to specify the disks, I found that the disks were unavailable for claiming.

For quite a while now, I’ve been utilizing a Cisco Nexus 3064PQ 10G/40G network switch to support my home lab. While the switch is a fantastic, feature-rich device, it also was designed for use in a data center environment. Thus, the switch generates a lot of heat, utilizes a lot of power, and has cooling fans that sound like turbo jets when running at full speed. Luckily, the only time that the fans run at full speed is during a reboot of the switch, but even at their lowest speed, they are quite noticeable.