blog.scottlowe.org

Here are some virtualization links I found interesting over the last few days:

• Duncan points out a VMTN thread regarding VMware HA behaviors in “heterogeneous” clusters, i.e., clusters that include 1/2 vCPU VMs as well as 4 vCPU VMs. The recommendation is to move these 4 vCPU VMs into their own cluster to help address this issue. This is similar to the discussions I had here about VMware HA failover capacity calculations, and it goes to further reinforce the fact that planning is needed to fully take advantage of VMware HA’s functionality. It’s not quite “fire and forget” just yet, folks.
• Via a number of different sites, I learned that VMware has released version 2.1 of VDM. More information is available in the Release Notes. Of key interest to me is the defined process for bulk importing individual desktops, which will make it easier for organizations that already have a number of desktop images to bring those VMs into VDM.
• On the VMware performance blog, they’re discussing achieving 100K IOPS with a single ESX server. While some of the readers are taking VMware to task for what they call an “unrealistic” test, I do have to agree with commenter Chad who points out that this exercise wasn’t intended to create a “best practices” configuration. The point was simply to see just how high the IOPS could go—nothing more, nothing less, just a test to see how high they could take the number. Yes, I think we’d all agree that using a cluster without 1:1 VM-to-VMFS mappings would be a realistic test, and personally I’d love to see the results of a test like that as well. Even so, it’s still handy to see that the I/O subsystem of ESX is more than capable of handling even the most demanding workloads.
• It becomes more obvious every day that I really need to take some time to learn PowerShell. With Microsoft embedding PowerShell in all their products and VMware embracing it via the VI Toolkit, it’s becoming ubiquitous. Now VMware is even showing off a series of videos about the VI Toolkit and its functionality. Ugh..I need more hours in a day to keep up with all this stuff.
• Paul Shannon of VM-Aware points out this VMware page describing support for Microsoft products, both from Microsoft as well as from various OEMs. Useful information to have, especially when you need to reassure a concerned customer about their support options. Personally, I think it’s just poor business (or poor ethics, take your pick) for Microsoft to be giving customers a hard time about virtualization support while developing their own virtualization product. Come on, we all know that the day Hyper-V goes RTM, Microsoft will start offering full product support for virtualized instances—well, virtualized instances running on Hyper-V, anyway. Am I wrong?
• Via Ruben at Brian Madden’s site (and thanks to an e-mail from Patrick Rouse himself), I learned about this VDI broker comparison created by Patrick Rouse of Quest/Provision Networks. Right now, it only compares VDM, XenDesktop, and Provision Networks Virtual Access Suite (VAS), but they are open to including additional brokers if enough requests come in.
• Brian Madden delves into an extended discussion of the key problem with VDI solutions: the display protocol. He posits that Citrix is in better shape than VMware because of the ICA protocol, but both suffer from the same problem in that “neither ICA nor RDP can remote all applications.” It’s a good read.
• This may be a bit dated now, but here’s some information on an unattended installation of Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V.
• InformationWeek recently published an article describing Hyper-V’s “advanced virtualization features.” The two things that are really touted by the article are I/O optimization via driver enlightenments, and support for failover clustering at the host level. Driver enlightenments, unless I am mistaken, are equivalent to Xen’s paravirtualized drivers, VMware’s VMware Tools, and Virtual Iron’s VI Tools; they all accomplish the same thing. I’m not sure how having the same feature as all the other competitors makes it “advanced”. It sounds like a standard feature if you ask me. Host clustering support is nice, but not that different from VMware HA; I believe Citrix is due to introduce a similar feature for XenServer soon as well. (It’s my understanding that Marathon Technologies plans to build their “Continuous Availability”-like product to extend this new XenServer HA functionality.) Not that I’m knocking Hyper-V or these features that are slated to be included in Hyper-V; you just can’t call them “advanced” if pretty much every other virtualization solution on the market also has the same features.

Well, that’s it for now. If you have links that you’d like to share with me or other readers, feel free to add them in the comments below or put them in my del.icio.us inbox. Thanks for reading!

My offhand comment about Leostream dropping their P>V product in Virtualization Short Take #8 got the attention of Leostream themselves, who provided this information as an update on the company’s motivations behind the drop of new licenses for P>V:

Hi Scott,
Quick update on Leostream. We posted a response to Alessandro’s blog post on Monday. The decision to “remove” P2V, in reality, is based on a decision we have taken to support fully our Connection Broker product (formerly the Virtual Machine Controller). There has been such great interest in the Leostream Connection Broker that it made sense to commit fully to its development. We currently have more than 100 Connection Broker customers, some of which include Avaya, Bell Canada, Commerzbank, and the United States Patent and Trademark Office. We were, until recently, customer-funded and as a result, have a highly motivated team. Our decision to raise Series A funding was taken purposely to build out marketing, sales and support to meet this growing demand in the marketplace. We are 100% committed to Connection Broker. As for P2V: while we will not be selling new licenses, we stand behind P2V and will continue to provide support for existing P2V customers.

I’ve stated before that I like the Leostream Connection Broker, so I’m glad to hear about Leostream’s decision to put all their resources into the development of the broker.

A couple of days ago my good friend Nick Triantos—formerly of Storage Foo fame, now writing at the Storage Nuts & Bolts Blog—published a short piece of a new version of Open Systems SnapVault (OSSV) that offers new functionality when used with VMware Infrastructure 3 (VI3).

For those that aren’t familiar with OSSV, it’s basically a way to bring NetApp-style snapshots to non-NetApp storage. For example, it’s pretty common to use OSSV to take snapshots of a server that is not attached to a NetApp SAN and store those snapshots on a NetApp SAN. Think of a remote office/branch office kind of scenario, for example, where the branch server can be easily backed up using incremental snapshots to a NetApp storage system in the main location. It’s pretty handy technology, to be honest.

After reading Nick’s piece on OSSV, one question popped in my mind: is he talking about running OSSV on the guest, or running OSSV on the ESX host? So I contacted Nick, obtained clarification, and wanted to post that clarification here. (BTW, thanks, Nick, for taking the time to answer my questions and allowing me to discuss this here.)

Nick’s article primarily focuses on the use of OSSV at the ESX level, running within the ESX Console OS (or Service Console). In this respect, OSSV will be taking snapshots of the VMDK files via the Service Console and replicating them over to a NetApp storage system. As with running OSSV in other environments, the snapshots are block-level incremental snapshots and thus only the changed blocks will be replicated across the wire when a snapshot is taken and shipped off to the destination storage system.

What’s apparently new here is that NetApp has optimized the OSSV code so that the initial baseline will only capture the utilized portions of a VMDK file. Keep in mind that ESX, by default, uses thick-provisioned disks, so that a 30GB virtual disk takes up 30GB on the physical storage. OSSV 2.6, the new version, understands that if only 10GB of that 30GB VDMK is actually being utilized, it will only replicate 10GB of data. That is really important in reducing the overhead required for the initial baseline transfer. Thereafter, OSSV operates as usual by capturing and replicating only changed blocks.

This is a nice addition to OSSV, and it greatly increases the usefulness of OSSV in VI3 environments. But there is a drawback…has anyone figured it out yet?

If you guessed that taking block-level incremental snapshots of the VMDK files via the Service Console means that we lose file-level granularity within the guest file system, you would be correct! What does this mean? Basically, it means that if you have to restore a VMDK from an OSSV snapshot, you have to restore the entire VMDK. You can’t restore individual files within a guest from an OSSV snapshot taken while OSSV is running at the ESX layer.

Before you start knocking OSSV as worthless, however, consider that VCB suffers the same limitation when creating image-level backups. Also keep in mind that file-level backups are only possible with VCB when the guest is running Microsoft Windows, so you’re forced to use image-level backups with any other operating system. Also keep in mind that file-level backups with VCB are slower than image-level backups. With these considerations in mind, it becomes clearer that the limitation is not inherent to OSSV per se, but rather a limitation of technologies operating at the ESX layer.

Of course, there are a number of workarounds to this; one way is to attach the restored VMDK to a different VM, then pull the individual files out that are needed. If you do need file-level granularity from within the guest OS (such as the ability to quickly and easily restore a specific file within a guest), then you can always run OSSV inside the guest and replicate block-level incremental snapshots from the guest over to a target NetApp storage system. Just be sure to keep these distinct procedures in mind as you plan backups of VMs using OSSV.

As always, I encourage you to ask questions, make comments, or add your thoughts below.

UPDATE: Keep in mind that OSSV is VMotion aware, meaning that block-level incrementals are preserved even after a VMotion operation. This is true even within DRS/HA clusters; you just have to install the OSSV agent on all ESX servers within the cluster. The real question: what effect will Storage VMotion have?

Various sites have reported this morning on the update to the Xen trademark policy, which controls how organizations and companies may or may not use the Xen trademark.

I haven’t yet read the actual Xen Trademark Policy, but I have read what was posted of Citrix’s response to the updated policy. I’m sure it’s just me, but this response sure sounds like “We can use Xen in our product names, but no one else can.” Now tell me, how does this benefit the entire Xen community?

Don’t get me wrong; Xen AB—which I assume to be the legal entity responsible for protecting the Xen trademarks now that XenSource is owned by Citrix—has every right to protect the Xen trademark and Xen logo. There is absolutely no question about that. But shouldn’t trademark restrictions on an open source project apply equally to all organizations, commercial or non-commercial, that utilize that open source project? Why should any one organization, regardless of which organization it is, get preferential treatment?

By the way, all this is a moot point if I am wrong about the ownership of the Xen trademark. If Citrix owns the Xen trademark, which they very well might as a result of the purchase of XenSource, then I suppose they are free to impose whatever restrictions they see fit.

It’s that time again, friends, time for another Virtualization Short Take!

• OpenSolaris on Fusion: As expected, Solaris/OpenSolaris fans are experimenting with OpenSolaris on Fusion. Apparently, it runs rather well.
• Brian Madden had an interesting thought about Thinstall (now ThinApp) plus WINE to eliminate Windows. In the end, Brian feels like many companies will just want to deal with the larger vendors, and won’t be willing to support this kind of “cobbled together” solution. The idea of using ThinApp on WINE on a non-Windows operating system is a pretty cool idea, but it may be a bit early for its time.
• Microsoft Hyper-V made it to RC1, apparently ahead of schedule. I wonder if they will try to make RTM in time for TechEd in Florida in June? In addition, Microsoft also released information about how they are “eating their own dog food” and using Hyper-V for the MSDN and TechNet web sites.
• Citrix has released XenDesktop 2.0, their VDI solution. Alessandro has a fairly complete breakdown of the components involved in the solution and the various editions under which it will be released. A lot of these components are pre-existing products that are being rebundled into XenDesktop; XenApp (Presentation Server) and Provisioning Server (Ardence) are two examples. VMware came out with a competitive response almost immediately, and Gareth dissected that response on DABCC. Having not actually installed XenDesktop yet, I don’t know how integrated—or not integrated—the various components are, so I’ll reserve judgment until later. I have my beefs with VDM; in particular, I don’t like how it mandates VM provisioning in order to use pools. I hope that Leostream’s removal of their P>V product as reported by Alessandro doesn’t portend dark days for Leostream.
• According to Tony Asaro at Virtual Iron, Citrix’s release of XenDesktop signals the beginning of a “shift” in focus from server virtualization to desktop virtualization. One must consider this comment in the context of who is providing the comment; Virtual Iron is, of course, a competitor in the server virtualization market whose product is also based on the Xen hypervisor. Besides, even if that is true, so what? Citrix has made an existence out of focusing on client-side application delivery. This would be completely logical, in my mind, and would allow Citrix to focus on an area where they are strong instead of competing in a market where they are weak.
• Lou Springer brings us a method of connecting to a VM’s console using VNC over SSH from Mac OS X. I’d seen references to using this with VMware Server, but didn’t know that it worked with VI3. Thanks, Lou! (Lou’s trick was based on information from this VMware KB article, by the way.)
• From IPMer, here’s some information on using VMware Converter to assist with VM snapshots. This was picked up by Rich over at VM /ETC and also included in the first-ever VMware Communities Roundtable podcast (which I’ve downloaded but not yet had the opportunity to actually review yet).

That’s it for today. I hope that everyone has a great Memorial Day. Don’t forget to thank a veteran or active serviceman/servicewoman for your freedom!

The recent couple of articles I wrote about using NetApp deduplication—in particular, the article on using NetApp deduplication with block storage—have raised some questions that are probably worth addressing. Although NetApp deduplication works just fine with block-based storage, there are some considerations with regards to how the LUNs should be provisioned when deduplication will come into play.

Fortunately for me, someone at NetApp decided that it would be a good idea to document the five basic configurations of using NetApp deduplication with block storage. As seen in this comment to an earlier article, Larry Freeman points out this document on the NetApp Communities site (has anyone else noticed the similarity between VMware Communities and NetApp Communities?) that outlines the 5 basic configurations and where the freed blocks go in each configuration. Excellent—that saves me some work!

The most common configurations I’ve seen are configurations D (LUN not space reserved, space guarantee set to Volume) and E (LUN not space reserved, space guarantee set to None). Customers like to see the LUNs “shrink” after deduplication, and this is the only way to make that happen.

The only things we need now are for NetApp to a) remove the volume size limitations and b) get us deduplication at the aggregate level. Then we’d really be set!

So, I finally have an update to my previous need for prayer.

First, I’d like to thank everyone for their support. Your prayers, kind thoughts, and encouraging words from all over the world have been invaluable. I can’t thank everyone enough. I had so many people e-mail me to tell me that they were thinking of me, wishing me well, or lifting my family in prayer. Again, thank you.

The situation was basically this: my second-oldest son, now 15, decided he wanted to cook up a plot with his mother—my ex-wife—and run away to her house. So, last Thursday, the day before I posted my request for prayer, she picked him up from school and took him away to her house. She refused to return him, even to the police, despite the fact that our court papers clearly gave me custody. She then didn’t take him to school on Friday or today (Monday). Keep in mind that most schools are in the midst of conducting end-of-grade (EOG) testing, including my son’s school.

<aside>It turns out that in North Carolina, where I live, unless your court papers specifically give the police the ability to enforce the court order, it can’t actually be enforced. The best you can hope for is filing for the court to find the other party in contempt. Isn’t the legal system grand?</aside>

Needless to say, I wanted to be sure he got back into school. After numerous attempts with the legal system on Friday, I was no better off. An emergency motion had been denied, and it appeared there was nothing I could do. This is where I was when I posted my article, “Need Prayer.”

After praying and working on the matter this weekend, today I finally got the court to grant me an emergency custody order that empowered law enforcement officials to get my son back. Hallelujah! Upon tracking down my ex-wife and my son and getting the law enforcement officials to actually show up, I got back my son tonight. I can have him back in school tomorrow for his EOG testing! Thank the Lord!

I wish I could say that I was glad that’s behind me, but I can’t. First, I’m not glad; I wish it hadn’t happened at all. Second, I don’t know that it’s completely behind me; I suspect that my ex-wife will be filing all sorts of nasty court documents in the next few days in an effort to retaliate.

Actually, that first statement’s not entirely true. I am a bit glad this happened. Through this test, as with so many other tests in a Christian’s life, I’ve learned new things about God and about serving God. I’ve learned new things about faith, and my ability to believe. So in that respect I’m thankful to have been given the opportunity. (I still wish God would use easier ways to get this information to us!)

Once again, thanks to everyone for everything! I appreciate it all. God bless!

Something major is going on with my family right now. For any reader who is a believer, I am begging for your prayers. Please, please, please pray for me and for my family, and ask others that you know to pray as well.

For those readers that aren’t believers, any well-wishing, good thoughts, etc., you want to send my way will be fine also.

Thanks in advance to everyone.

No, this posting isn’t about me; I switched to the Mac years ago. Instead, this posting is about a story that I’d seen quite a while ago, but just hadn’t gotten around to discussing here on the blog.

Quite some time ago, Computerworld ran some articles about an enterprise company that was switching entirely to Macs. The articles are here:

Mac Attack! An enterprise PC shop switches to Apple
Mac switch revisited: An enterprise PC shop’s move to Apple isn’t as easy as expected

It’s an interesting pair of articles that help to highlight the attention that Apple and Mac OS X are getting these days. In this particular case, I found this statement particularly compelling:

Frantz says AWC had calculated “significant savings” associated with migrating to Apple software during the proof-of-concept testing last summer. “We knew we would have sufficient ROI for the change based on some broad generalizations, and the savings were enough to green-light the project,” he says.

Everyone likes to talk about how expensive Macs are, and yet here is a company that has found “significant savings” upon switching to Apple hardware running Mac OS X. Interesting.

To be fair, the company in the article—AWC—isn’t going completely Mac; they are keeping SQL Server on Windows and a few other applications as well. That’s fine; I’ve long advocated to use the best tool for the job. If SQL Server is the best tool for the job for them, then they should use it. I’m just glad to see that companies are increasingly recognizing that Windows on the desktop isn’t always the best tool for the job anymore.

Well, it’s official—I’m headed to Tech-Ed 2008 in Orlando, Florida, in early June! Microsoft was kind enough to offer me a complimentary “Press Pass” to attend, and since I was going to be in Orlando around that time anyway on vacation, I shuffled some things around to make it happen. I plan on using the time to gather as much information as possible about Hyper-V, SCVMM 2008, and related technologies. Rest assured that as much of that information as possible will find its way here.

The free “Press Pass” from Microsoft must mean a couple of things:

1. Prominent bloggers are apparently considered members of the press.
2. I must be a prominent blogger. (Woo hoo!)

This will mark my second conference of the year; the first was VMware Partner Exchange 2008 in San Diego last week (my summary of the event is found here). Of course, then we have the “big daddy” of virtualization events later in the year in Las Vegas: VMworld 2008. I haven’t registered yet—I know, I really should register. But since Microsoft was kind enough to provide a free Press Pass to their event, I was kind of hoping VMware would offer a free Press Pass to VMworld as well. So, VMware, what do you think?