Horizon Agent Support for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

[Perttu]

Hi!

We're starting to deploy Ubuntu 16.04 LTS images over 14.04 releases in the physical world and I wonder whether I could apply the same for VDI. Has anybody tried this out even VMware doesn't officially support newer than 14.04 releases? Any problems encountered?

Horizon Environment is still on 6.2.1 but I've successfully installed Horizon Agent 7.0.0 for Linux. This seems to be officially supported combination thought.

[Lindsayl]

Linux VDI support for Ubuntu 1604 is in roadmap.

[Perttu]

Hi Lindsayl‌

I was able to get the Horizon Agent for Linux to work perfectly on Ubuntu 16.04 with the following modifications.

1) Within the installer tarball there is a file named 'commonlib.sh' in folder 'bin'. I did two modifications to this file.

     a) On Ubuntu 16.04 SystemD path is /lib/systemd/system so I just had to change the variable SYSTEMD_CONF_PATH to this value.

     b) Also the mechanism that identifies distro spesific service manager cannot keep up with the fact that Ubuntu has both initctl and systemctl present and in the code the existence of initctl is evaluated first. Thus I just hardcoded that SERVICE_MGR=SYSTEMD on the first line after # Identify distro spesific service definition and control

2) For some reason the viewagent file in the root of the installer isn't being copied to /etc/sysconfig. The viewagent service refers to this file. This can be done manually just by saying $ mkdir /etc/sysconfig && cp viewagent $_

After these changes the installer runs without errors. Next step would be adding some UI customisation to Cinnamon desktop manager to make it more user friendly. (Remove buttons for shutdown and switch user). We're running Ubuntu but we have ported Cinnamon from Mint as the default desktop manager.

[Perttu]

Hi

I've done some debugging with Ubuntu 16.04 and Linux Agent for Horizon 7.0.2 and noticed that installer itself finishes flawlessly without any user tinkering and desktops become 'available' right after I've added them to a Managed Pool. But after a following Linux VM's reboot the 'lightdm' service doesn't start up anymore and dmesg logs continously errors of this type:

[drm:vmw_fb_setcolreg [vmwgfx]] *ERROR* Bad regno <increasing number here>

I've tried setting different options for 3D Renderer in Desktop pool settings and especially "Managed using vSphere Client' looked promising but had no effect on this problem. I thought that this might be a display driver or a display configuration related issue.

Anyway  'unmanaged' Linux Agent worked just well in Horizon 6.2.3 environment on these exactly same Linux images with the same vmwgfx module.

# modinfo vmwgfx

filename:       /lib/modules/4.4.0-38-generic/kernel/drivers/gpu/drm/vmwgfx/vmwgfx.ko

version:        2.9.0.0

Any ideas what's up? Any pre-release candidates to test with?

Regards,

Perttu

[Perttu]

Hi!

The newest Horizon 7.0.3 agent should now fully support Ubuntu 16.04 but we're facing an issue where lightdm dies at the same moment when the vm is added to a Horizon Desktop pool. 

root@hostxxx:~# systemctl status lightdm

lightdm.service - Light Display Manager

   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/lightdm.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)

  Drop-In: /lib/systemd/system/display-manager.service.d

           └─xdiagnose.conf

   Active: inactive (dead) (Result: exit-code) since Fri 2016-12-09 16:14:26 EET; 7min ago

     Docs: man:lightdm(1)

  Process: 2314 ExecStart=/usr/sbin/lightdm (code=exited, status=1/FAILURE)

  Process: 2307 ExecStartPre=/bin/sh -c [ "$(basename $(cat /etc/X11/default-display-manager 2>/dev/null))" = "lightdm" ] (code

Main PID: 2314 (code=exited, status=1/FAILURE)

Dec 09 16:14:26 hostxxx systemd[1]: lightdm.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.

Dec 09 16:14:26 hostxxx systemd[1]: lightdm.service: Service hold-off time over, scheduling restart.

Dec 09 16:14:26 hostxxx systemd[1]: Stopped Light Display Manager.

Dec 09 16:14:26 hostxxx systemd[1]: lightdm.service: Start request repeated too quickly.

Dec 09 16:14:26 hostxxx systemd[1]: Failed to start Light Display Manager.

Also in the dmesg the following is being logged repeatedly :

[drm:vmw_fb_setcolreg [vmwgfx]] *ERROR* Bad regno 255.

[txiong]

Hi Perttu,

Yes, Linux Agent 7.0.3 officially supported Ubuntu 1604.

Would you please confirm if lightdm issue is a some-time issue or 100% issue?

If the issue still occurs, would you please collect the DCT bundle (sudo /usr/lib/vmware/viewagent/bin/dct-debug.sh) and send to us? Thanks.

Tiddy