Enabling dynamic codec switching Horizon View 7.10

VMware Horizon 7.10 – released on September 17, 2019 – ships with a new dynamic encoder. Depending on what content you’re watching in your VDI, it will seamlessly switch to the best suiting codec for optimal performance/quality-balance. While H.264 is ideal for rapidly changing content like videos, JPG/PNG offers better quality for more static content like Office applications.

As of this release the “switch”-Codec is disabled by default and must be explicitly enabled via the registry. Also, make sure you’re using Horizon Client 5.2 or later to make the codec work.

To enable the new feature, you need to set this registry key on your VDI machine:

Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\VMware, Inc.\VMware Blast\Config\EncoderSwitchEnabled
Type: REG_SZ
Value: 1

When you have created the registry key, re-initiate the connection to your VDI machine. Then check with the “VMware Horizon Performance Tracker”-tool if you can see “Encoder Name” is set to “switch”. Like in the screenshot of my HomeLab here:

If you would like to get more details about the 7.10 release, you can get the release notes here or a blog article by VMware here.

Unified Access Gateway with Microsoft Azure AD Integration using SAML

Many customers are moving towards extending their Datacenter workloads to the clouds, and Microsoft Azure is one of the partners that the VMware EUC team works very closely with. VMWare Unified Access Gateway, what we called “UAG,” is available in the Azure AD app gallery directly, reducing and simplifying the efforts of integration and configurations. […]

How to check the compliance of VMware new Licensing for an enterprise

February 18, 2020 VMware

As you might already know VMware announced a change to its per-CPU licensing model,effective April 2, 2020. Do you want to check if you are compliant or need more licenses? Just see below VMwareKB which contains a PowerCLI script for checking this. VMware KB

Install and configure VMware PowerCLI version 10

March 2, 2018 Home, VMware

VMware PowerCLI is a collection of Windows Powershell modules that are used to manage and maintain a VMware virtual environment. VMware PowerCLI contains modules of cmdlets based on Microsoft PowerShell for automating vSphere, VMware Site Recovery Manager,vSphere Automation SDK, vCloud Director, vCloud Air, vSphere Update Manager, vRealize Operations Manager, VMware Horizon, NSX-T, and VMware Cloud on AWS administration. VMware PowerCLI provides a PowerShell interface to the VMware product […]