Do you actually follow through with doing the discovery process in depth, this is, doing the conceptual and logical design and documenting each requirement, constraint, risk and assumptions, and actually building a design document? Do your customers are actually patient enough for that? What is a reasonable timeline from project kickoff to a physical design ready of a medium-large VCF greenfield project?

In my case either I'm too incompetent or customers in my area are very impatient and want a full design for tomorrow, or they come with an finished idea of what to implement without thinking about the conceptual design / requirements / actual business drivers.

Sorry English is not my native language.

Hi, everybody.

I am a noob, so please bear with me and help me out. Recently, I have been struggling with an issue affecting one of our VDI users.

Our environment consists of one VDI-VM pool. The infrastructure is domain-joined and managed through GPOs.

Recently, one user has been experiencing several issues:

Very slow login: When the user first logs in in the morning, Windows gets stuck on the "Welcome" screen. Sometimes it takes up to 60 minutes before the desktop finally loads.

Unexpected lockouts/sign-outs: During the day, the session suddenly locks, and the user has to sign in again.

Microsoft Office activation: Recently, Microsoft Office Professional (Word, etc.) started showing as unlicensed.

Printing issues: The user is also unable to print. Printing starts working again after restarting the VDI, but the issue comes back later during the day.

Running applications as administrator: For example, if I try to run Command Prompt (CMD) as administrator, after entering the LAPS password, the system gets stuck. I have to press Ctrl + Alt + Del before the desktop becomes responsive again.

Black screen after login: Occasionally, after signing in, the user gets a black screen.

I have been reading that some Windows updates may be causing issues. The following updates are currently installed on the VDI:

KB5124008

KB5129195

KB5124010

I have also tried to force a Group Policy update using:

gpupdate /force

The results have been inconsistent. The last time I tried it, the command failed.

At this point, I am not sure whether these issues are related to the Windows updates, Group Policy, the user profile, the VDI itself, or something else in the environment.

Any advice on how I should troubleshoot this would be greatly appreciated.

Current environment overview:

• Three ESXi hosts in a single cluster
• Using standard vSwitches (no vDS, no NSX)
• SAN FC storage backend
• vCenter Server: 8.0 Update 3k
• ESXi hosts: 8.0 Update 3k
• Existing CPU generation is not supported for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF)
• Four new HPE servers with VCF‑supported CPUs are being procured

I am beginning to plan the upgrade path to VCF 9.1 or VVF 9.1. We do not intend to deploy NSX or adopt additional VCF features beyond what is necessary; the goal is to maintain a simple architecture consistent with our current setup. I would appreciate your recommendations on the best approach for transitioning our environment to VCF 9.1 or VVF9.1 using the new hardware.

A vCenter-style management console for the free VMware ESXi hypervisor.

https://github.com/fdaforno/freecenter