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Citrix Synergy Day 1 Keynote

Tuesday, May 5, 2009 in Virtualization by slowe | 1 comment

In advance of speaking at Virtualization Congress 2009 on Thursday, I’m attending Citrix Synergy. The Internet connection here in the main conference call is unavailable, so I’ll publish this as soon as I have connectivity back to the site.

The keynote starts with Garr Reynolds, an associate professor at Kansai Gaidai in Japan. I’m a bit unsure why he is on-stage getting the keynote started, but it’s a good presentation. After leading the audience through a self-introduction in Japanese, Garr Reynolds launches into a discussion of simplicity, the beginner’s mind, and nakedness (no, not that kind!), all centered around “thinking differently”. He asks a couple of good questions and makes a couple of good points: Is simplicity the same as easy? No, because easy would be doing the same thing. Doing the same thing is easy? What is simplicity? It is not stupid, it is actually quite difficult. Simplicity is not the same as simplistic. Simplicity means the achievement of maximum effect with minimum means.

Reynolds now moves on to the second part of his talk: the beginner’s mind. It means losing the fear and taking a risk. That is the basis of the beginner’s mind. We need to lose the fear of being wrong so that we can come up with something original. In Zen thinking, we need to make a decision and let the rest go. In the words of Yoda, “You must unlearn what you have learned.”

Finally, Reynolds moves on to nakedness. Specifically, “shizen,” or naturalness. It means being open, honest, transparent. After a brief discussion, he moves back to the key themes and wraps them together into a closing idea around using these themes to seek continuous improvement.

John Gantz of IDC now takes the stage. Gantz is the Chief Research Officer for IDC and will be speaking about renaissance and crisis. Gantz believes that the economic crisis holds opportunity for IT to “sharpen its swords” and figure out the best ways to use technology to “do more with less.” As he continues on with his presentation, it’s more of the same. In my opinion, there’s nothing being presented here that hasn’t already been said. We already know that we will have the same or fewer staff to deal with more servers, more mobile users, more data, and more information. That’s nothing new, to be honest.

After a 20 minute coffee break, the MGM/Mirage CTO gets on the stage, sells and pitches the MGM Grand for a bit, and then very briefly discusses MGM/Mirage’s use of Citrix products. He then introduces Mark Templeton, CEO of Citrix.

Templeton’s vision is to deliver every desktop and every application, and to turn every data center into a dynamic delivery center. Today’s discussion will focus on users and desktops; tomorrow’s discussion will center on data centers, servers, and clouds. Templeton mentions the Citrix Innovation Award and the finalists: Emory Healthcare, HDFC, and Tesco. Next he shows the video from Tesco that describes how they use Citrix products and solutions. Tesco’s story of virtualizing their data center is impressive, but not terribly innovative in my opinion.

Templeton lays out a discussion on how consumer-oriented computing, coupled with Web 2.0, now has a steeper technology innovation curve than enterprise computing. Templeton challenges the idea of traditional computing and traditional ways of thinking. Why does the enterprise think that the network must be owned and controlled end-to-end? Why do enterprises think that the company must own and control endpoints? According to Templeton, the computing industry is full of dead ideas, and those dead ideas are driving the industry closer to extinction. Much in the same way the mainframe was eclipsed by the personal computer, today’s enterprise computing environment will be eclipsed by consumer computing and “thinking differently” if we don’t change. The fight is between the momentum of consumerization versus the inertia of dead ideas.

Templeton shares some math around complexity; reducing parts can have a very significant impact on the reliability of the overall systems. What if the number of parts in the enterprise could be reduced? The reliability of enterprise systems could be improved.

Next, Templeton explains how he thinks that the DirecTV model—controllers connected to receivers over a delivery network that operates independently of content and endpoints—is the right model for the enterprise network. Controllers in the network work with gateways and repeaters in the delivery network to connect to receivers on various endpoints.

With that, Templeton introduces the video for Emory Healthcare, the next finalist for the Citrix Innovation award.

Now it appears we will get into the real meat of today’s presentation, as Mark Templeton delves into a discussion of IT’s costs in supporting users and endpoints. According to Templeton, you can’t think of buying desktops or installing applications; you have to think differently and think of delivering desktops and delivery applications from a virtualized controller at the head (the data center). The desktop now becomes a set of components that can be isolated and separated. This allows organizations to independently deliver, on demand, user profiles, applications, and desktop operating systems. Clearly, XenApp is a leading component in delivering applications independently of the desktop operating system. He mentions the recent announcement by SAP of using XenApp on XenServer to deliver applications to SAP users. With over 200,000 customers worldwide, Citrix calculates that about 25 million unique applications are being delivered to 100 million users daily.

XenDesktop is another key component of Citrix’s vision of delivering desktops, applications, and user profiles. According to Templeton, XenDesktop delivers the best user experience on the broadest range of devices across the widest selection of delivery networks. Collier County Schools, who presented Templeton with Citrix’s first PO for XenDesktop last year at Synergy, provided an update on where things stand one year later. But why isn’t Citrix talking about more XenDesktop customers? Apparently Citrix has closed, with the help of CSC, a deal for 40,000 users worldwide. Templeton did not, unfortunately, disclose the identity of the customer.

Mark Templeton again refers to the partnership, or project, between Citrix and Intel regarding the developoment of a client hypervisor that would provide a solution for disconnected mobile users. He is, of course, referring to Project Independence. It’s new name is XenClient. (Not unexpectedly, Pat Gelsinger will discuss the Xeon 5500 and XenServer tomorrow.) XenClient is intended to be everywhere, will plug into the rest of the Citrix architecture, and will be free.

Templeton now moves into a discussion about delivery. He seems to knock VMware by saying that virtualizing desktops is not the same as virtualizing servers because “it’s all about the experience.” Citrix HDX technologies is the solution to delivering applications across LAN, wireless LAN, Internet, and 3G networks regardless of the application type. He shows off HDX vs. “the other guys” by showing a series of videos comparing HDX against other delivery protocols. According to Templeton, HDX delivers a high-fidelity experience using only 1/10th of the bandwidth compared to other protocols. With that lead-in about HDX, Templeton shows the video for HDFC Bank, the third candidate for the Citrix Innovation award.

Templeton charges the audience to move away from thinking in traditional fashion to instead think of IT as publishing resources to which users can subscribe. This goes back to the DirecTV model, and it is a natural lead-in for Templeton to discuss Citrix Receiver. Citrix Receiver is described as a universal client for IT service delivery. Citrix Receiver allows IT to advertise services, using existing infrastructure, to which users can subscribe from a full range of endpoints across a variety of delivery networks.

Next up is a demo of Citrix Receiver. Templeton shows off Citrix Receiver running on both Windows Vista as well as Windows 7. In fact, the Windows 7 desktop is actually a remote desktop hosted on XenDesktop in Fort Lauderdale, FL. The demo was actually quite impressive—you probably would not have been able to guess that the desktop was a remotely hosted desktop. “Is it live, or is it HDX?” That’s Templeton’s question about just how well HDX works.

One new component is required on the back-end to help support this infrastructure: Citrix Merchandising Server. This component keeps clients updated, schedules plug-in distribution, advertises new services, centralizes operations, and handles reporting and logging. Merchandising Server is actually a set of virtual machines intended to run on top of XenServer (can you say virtual appliance?).

Citrix Receiver for Windows 1.0 is available today, and is free. Citrix Receiver will be coming to the iPhone, and Templeton provides a demo of Citrix Receiver on an iPod Touch over a Wi-Fi connection. The iPod is connecting to a Citrix head-end hosted on the Amazon EC2 cloud. The iPhone Receiver also offers a feature called Doc Finder, which makes it easier to find and open documents on the iPhone. The next demo actually shows a 3-D animation running on the iPhone. This is pretty impressive.

Demo accounts are available for users to use their iPhones to connect to the EC2 cloud and experience Citrix Receiver for themselves. The Citrix Receiver for the iPhone is available today on the App Store, and it is free. Windows Mobile and Symbian phones will be supported in the future, as well as Android-based phones through a partnership with Open Kernel Labs and the OLK4 Hyper-cell hypervisor.

Templeton next announces Citrix Dazzle, a self-service “app store” for employees and IT resources. It builds upon Citrix Receiver to provice self-service discovery and access to applications that are delivered via Citrix infrastructure. The Citrix tagline for Dazzle is “Putting the personal back into personal computing”. Dazzle puts an iTunes/App Store interface on top of the applications that are being published and delivered by the same head-end services that drive Receiver. It’s an interesting take, but I’m not yet sold on the idea.

Dazzle will be available later in the year, and yes, it will be free.

With that, Templeton closes the keynote—after an astounding four hours—and reminds everyone that tomorrow’s keynote will be focused on servers and the data center.

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Marathon everRun 2G and everRun VM Lockstep

Monday, April 20, 2009 in Microsoft, Virtualization by slowe | 6 comments

I first wrote about Marathon Technologies and their everRun VM product last September just prior to the start of VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas, NV. Back at the start of 2009 I also mentioned Marathon’s joint development agreement with Microsoft and the intended plan to bring everRun VM to Hyper-V environments.

Today Marathon announced the availability of their everRun VM Lockstep product, which brings full circle the product announcement from last September. This product, which runs only on Citrix XenServer, puts into place the “three levels” of availability that Marathon has often spoke of:

  • Auto-restart high availability (XenServer HA)
  • Component-level fault tolerance
  • Full system-level fault tolerance

With full system-level fault tolerance, Marathon is able to provide organizations with the ability to protect applications with the highest levels of availability, eliminating downtime due to physical server failure. If a physical server fails, the virtual machine continues running on another physical server without any disruption.

The announcement of everRun VM Lockstep gives Marathon and Citrix a slight edge over competitor VMware, whose similar VMware Fault Tolerance offering has been demonstrated and discussed extensively but has not been officially announced. Given that Marathon expects everRun VM Lockstep to be available within 30 days, they may also have an edge over VMware in getting their product to market as well. Marathon everRun VM Lockstep will run on the free version of Citrix XenServer.

At the same time, Marathon is also announcing everRun 2G, the successor to Marathon’s everRun HA and everRun FT products for Windows Server environments. Marathon everRun 2G combines and extends the functionality of the previous generation of products, allowing organizations to provide high availability to any Windows application without modification or scripting. Like everRun VM, everRun 2G will offer “dialable” availability ranging from automated HA to full system-level fault tolerance.

Like everRun VM Lockstep, everRun 2G is expected to be available within the next 30 days.

Visit the Marathon Technologies web site for more information.

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It’s Official: XenServer Available for Free

Monday, February 23, 2009 in Virtualization by slowe | 7 comments

Although word of this announcement was leaked last week, today Citrix made the announcement official: Citrix XenServer will be available to customers free of charge. Although I was briefed by Citrix on this news the day before word broke, I assured Citrix that I would honor my word and not discuss the news until the embargo expired.

As I understand it, there are actually three parts to the announcement:

  1. XenServer 5 will be available free. According to the information shared with me by Citrix, this won’t be a stripped down version of XenServer, either: this is supposedly the equivalent of XenServer 5 Enterprise Edition, so functionality like live migration, Active Directory integration, and a centralized management console are all included.
  2. Citrix will be unveiling a new product line called Citrix Essentials for XenServer and Hyper-V. This is a management product that provides automated lab management, dynamic provisioning, StorageLinkTM technology to leverage advanced storage functionality, and advanced high availability (but only when used with XenServer). Citrix Essentials will manage both Hyper-V and XenServer, and is intended to integrate with Microsoft System Center and other high-level management frameworks.
  3. Finally, Citrix is extending their relationship with Microsoft around virtualization. Microsoft will be recommending Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V as the management platform, and Microsoft will be adding support for XenServer in System Center.

In addition to these moves, it is my understanding that Citrix will be more aggressively moving more of their XenServer-related code into the open source community. The first of these moves has already been announced, and I am assured by Simon Crosby that more code is slated to be open sourced in the coming weeks and months.

So what’s my take on this announcement? I’ve already stated that I’m glad to see Citrix giving back to the Xen open source community, from which they’ve benefited so greatly, and I’m looking forward to the continued movement of XenServer-related code into the open source community. The StorageLinkTM stuff looks pretty cool, and if Citrix can actually deliver on it then they’ll be back on par with what’s slated to be in the vStorage APIs from VMware. (Wonder who will deliver first?) Citrix Essentials looks interesting, but it’s really too early to tell just yet. The cross-platform approach is nice, and a welcome acknowledgement of the heterogeneous nature of the data center, but as a new product it will take some time to establish itself in the market.

That leaves only free XenServer. There’s no question that XenServer receives far less attention than Hyper-V, despite the fact that it’s been around far longer than its Microsoft cousin. Now that XenServer is available at no charge, this will open the door of many more customers who may not have previously considered the Citrix product. That will likely increase uptake of the product in the SMB market, but I doubt that it will make a significant impact in the large enterprise market, where VMware’s flagship products still rule. The other effect of the announcement will be on other Xen-based virtualization solutions, like Virtual Iron, who now have to compete with Citrix on a completely different playing field. I would not be surprised to see a number of these smaller players exit the game, either by acquisition or bankruptcy.

The real question here is this: what will VMware do? VMware continues to pour R&D dollars into the development of its hypervisor and surrounding applications, and only makes limited versions of its bare metal product available for free (ESXi). Will this push VMware to make “full” ESXi available for free? Or will VMware continue to believe, as they have in the past, that the hypervisor is still not a commodity, and therefore continue to charge for it? I suspect that their path will be the latter and not the former, and it will be justified by the presence of features like Storage VMotion and VMware FT that have yet to be replicated by any other vendor. While I have my concerns about that approach, only time will tell if my concerns are justified.

UPDATE: The Citrix press release is available here.

UPDATE 2: As shared by David Marshall, it turns out that the automated lab management functionality of Citrix Essentials is being OEM’ed from VMLogix.

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Citrix Open Sources Their VHD Implementation

Thursday, February 19, 2009 in Virtualization by slowe | 3 comments

One sticking point I’ve had with Citrix since the XenSource acquisition has been the perception of a failure to give back to the open source Xen community. Note that I said perception. It appeared, following the XenSource acquisition, that Citrix was all about using open source Xen as a base but failing to return any of enhancements they made to the code base. No, I don’t have any concrete examples; again, this was the perception.

It appears that Citrix is now taking steps to remedy that perception. In a blog entry posted last night, Simon Crosby announced that Citrix has open sourced their optimized VHD support. This means that XenServer’s robust VHD implementation is now available to any developer under the BSD license. In case you don’t already know, VHD is the same virtual disk technology Microsoft uses in Hyper-V, and which Microsoft is using even more extensively in future versions of Windows.

In my opinion, this is an excellent move. It addresses the perception of failing to give back to the open source community, and it puts what appears to be a valuable piece of technology into the open source world. Making XenServer’s VHD implementation available for other open source developers to use in their projects puts VHD on the fast track to being the de facto virtual disk standard. Assuming that other virtualization platforms adopt VHD support—and I’m not sure why many of them wouldn’t adopt VHD support, except for VMware—we’ve now removed a huge barrier to interoperability. That’s a good thing.

Not being a lawyer, I’m a bit worried about the compatibility of the BSD license—which is generally regarded as quite generous—and the Microsoft Open Specification Promise, but I’ll leave that for others to hash out.

It will be interesting to see if Citrix also open sources some of their other XenServer-related technologies. Time will tell…

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VMM Beta 1.5 is Here

Thursday, January 22, 2009 in Virtualization by slowe | No comments

Quickly following the initial beta release of Virtualization Manager Mobile (VMM), Schley Andrew Kutz has now released beta 1.5 of VMM. The updated beta, available via the relaunched lostcreations.com site, boasts several new features:

  • In addition to support for VMware Infrastructure 3 and VMware Server 2, VMM now supports Citrix XenServer 5.
  • VMM will now “gracefully degrade” on mobile devices that don’t have a fully AJAX-capable browser. This new Lite Mode extends VMM’s mobile support to include devices like a Blackberry or Windows Mobile phone.
  • Beta 1.5 adds a new feature called Accidental Touch Detection (ATD). ATD prevents users from accidentally powering off a VM by requiring an intentional touch, measured by a depression of at least 500 milliseconds. This feature will only be available in full mode, not the new Lite Mode.

The software will be free while it’s in beta, but licenses will be required upon release. Active beta participants will receive licenses in exchange for their participation. To find out more, or to see a more full list of features, visit the VMM site.

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Sanbolic Optimizes Melio FS, Adds Virtualization Support

Friday, January 9, 2009 in Microsoft, Storage, Virtualization by slowe | No comments

Back in June, I wrote about Sanbolic and Melio FS as a workaround for the “one-VM-per-LUN” limitation that Hyper-V’s Quick Migration imposes. By running Melio FS on a Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V host, users could put multiple VMs in the same LUN and still use Quick Migration. At the same time, Sanbolic was also announcing that they were supporting the use of Melio FS, their clustered file system, inside Windows Server-based VMs running on VMware ESX.

In September, Sanbolic announced that they would be supporting Melio FS in VMs running on Hyper-V. This expanded their clustered file system support so that VMs running on either VMware ESX or Hyper-V could use Melio FS for shared storage access.

Yesterday, Sanbolic added support for running Melio FS in guests on Citrix XenServer, bringing support for their Windows-based clustered file system to VMs on all three major virtualization platforms. In addition, yesterday’s announcement also indicated that Sanbolic was adding support for the Windows Server 2008 R2 beta, and that Melio FS had been optimized for block objects like virtual disk files and databases. The full press release is available here as a PDF file.

Clearly, Sanbolic wants to protect the value of Melio FS as Microsoft prepares to enter the clustered file system market with Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV), included in the R2 beta. It’s unclear to me whether CSV is going to be limited to virtualization only, addressing the “one-VM-per-LUN” issue, or whether Microsoft will also support CSV in other applications. By optimizing Melio FS for shared access to objects like virtual disk files and by extending support to run Melio FS in VMs on all the major platforms, Sanbolic hopes to establish Melio FS as a “de facto” standard in Windows-based clustered file systems.

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Marathon to Bring EverRun VM to Hyper-V

Friday, January 9, 2009 in Microsoft, Virtualization by slowe | No comments

Today, Marathon Technologies announced an expanded development and marketing agreement with Microsoft Corporation designed to bring fault tolerance and high availability to a wider audience. As I understand it from talking to the folks at Marathon, the ultimate goal of this new agreement will bear fruit in two key areas:

  1. First, Marathon will expand support for Windows Server 2008 on its existing EverRun VM solution for Citrix XenServer. Today, that product provides support for Windows Server 2003 on XenServer.
  2. Second, EverRun VM will be supported with a future version of Hyper-V, bringing the same fault tolerance and high availability features available today with XenServer to Hyper-V.

Marathon and Citrix made some announcements about EverRun VM and XenServer HA around the timeframe of the XenServer 5 announcement at VMworld. I wrote about that here and again here. Have a look at those articles for more information about how EverRun VM functions today in a Citrix XenServer environment. It is anticipated that EverRun VM on Hyper-V will look and behave in exactly the same fashion as today’s XenServer variant.

What Marathon is ultimately seeking to achieve is feature parity between EverRun VM on XenServer and EverRun VM on Hyper-V, as well as to provide a single management layer for manipulating fault tolerance and high availability regardless of the underlying virtualization layer. At some point, the idea of pairing XenServer and Hyper-V in a fault-tolerant pair might get explored, but that will strictly be driven by just how cozy Citrix and Microsoft become.

The Windows Server 2008 support for EverRun VM on XenServer—this is the ability to use EverRun VM to provide component-level or system-level fault tolerance for Windows Server 2008 guests—is expected in the first half of 2009. No dates were provided for a version of EverRun VM that will work with Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V.

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Virtualization Short Take #25

Wednesday, January 7, 2009 in Microsoft, Virtualization by slowe | 19 comments

Welcome to Virtualization Short Take #25, the first edition of this series for 2009! Here I’ve collected a variety of articles and posts that I found interesting or useful. Enjoy!

  • We’ll start off today’s list with some Hyper-V links. First up is this article on how to manually add a VM configuration to Hyper-V. It would be interesting to me to know some of the technical details—i.e., the design decisions that led Microsoft to architect things in this way—that might explain why this process is, in my opinion, so complicated. Was it scalability? Manageability? If anyone knows, please share your information in the comments.
  • It looks like this post by John Howard on how to resolve event ID 4096 with Hyper-V is also closely related.
  • This blog post brings to light a clause in Microsoft’s licensing policy that forces organizations to use Windows Server 2008 CALs when accessing a Windows Server 2003-based VM hosted on Hyper-V. In the spirit of disclosure, it’s important to note that this was written by VMware, but an independent organization apparently verified the licensing requirements. So, while you may get Hyper-V at no additional cost (not free) with Windows Server 2008, you’ll have to pay to upgrade your CALs to Windows Server 2008 in order to access any Windows Server 2003-based VMs on those Hyper-V hosts. Ouch.
  • Wrapping up this edition’s Microsoft virtualization coverage is this post by Ben Armstrong warning Hyper-V users about the use of physical disks with VMs. Apparently, it’s possible to connect a physical disk to both the Hyper-V parent partition as well as a guest VM, and…well, bad things can happen when you do that. The unfortunate part is that Hyper-V doesn’t block users from doing this very thing.
  • Daniel Feller asks the question, “Am I the only one who has trouble understanding Cloud Computing?” No, Daniel, you’re not the only one—I’ve written before about how amorphous and undefined cloud computing is. In this post over at the Citrix Community site, Daniel goes on to indicate that cloud computing’s undefined nature is actually its greatest strength:
     

    As I see it, Cloud Computing is a big white board waiting for organizations to make their requirements known. Do you want a Test/QA environment to do whatever? This is cloud computing. Do you want someone to deliver office productivity applications for you? That is cloud computing. Do you want to have all of your MP3s stored on an Internet storage repository so you can get to it from any device? That is also cloud computing.

    Daniel may be right there, but I still insist that there need to be well-defined and well-understood standards around cloud computing in order for cloud computing to really see broad adoption. Perhaps cloud computing is storing my MP3s on the Internet, but what happens when I want to move to a different MP3 storage provider? Without standards, that becomes quite difficult, perhaps even impossible. I’m not the only one who thinks this way, either; check this post by Geva Perry. Until some substance appears in all these clouds, people are going to hold off.

  • Rodney Haywood shared a useful command to use with VMware HA in this post about blades and VMware HA. He points out that it’s a good idea to spread VMware HA primary nodes across multiple blade chassis so that the failure of a single chassis does not take down all the primary nodes. One note about the using the “ftcli” command is that you’ll need to set the FT_DIR environment variable first using “export FT_DIR=/opt/vmware/aam” (assuming you’re using bash as the shell on VMware ESX). Otherwise, the advice to spread clusters across chassis as well as to ensure that primary agents are spread across chassis is advice that should be followed.
  • Joshua Townsend has a good post at VMtoday.com about using PowerShell and SQL queries to determine the amount of free space within guest VMs. As he states in his post, this can often impact the storage design significantly. It seems to me that there used to be a plug-in for vCenter that added this information, but I must be mistaken as I can no longer find it. Oh, and one of Eric Siebert’s top 10 lists also points out a free utility that will provide this information as well.
  • I don’t have a record of where this information turned up, but this article from NetApp (NOW login required) on troubleshooting NFS performance was quite helpful. In particular, it linked to this VMware KB article that provides in-depth information on how to identify IRQ sharing that’s occurring between the Service Console and the VMkernel. Good stuff.
  • Want more information on scaling a VMware View installation? Greg Lato posts a notice about the VMware View Reference Architecture Kit, available from VMware, that provides more information on some basic “building blocks” in creating a large-scale View implementation. I’ve only had the opportunity to skim through the documents thus far, but I like what I’ve seen thus far. Chad also mentions the Reference Architecture Kit on his site as well.
  • Duncan at Yellow Bricks posts yet another useful “in the trenches” post about VMFS-3 heap size. If your VMware ESX server is handling more than 4TB of open VMDK files, then it’s worth having a look at this VMware KB article.
  • The idea of “virtual routing” is an interesting idea, but I share the thoughts of one of the commenters in that technologies like VMotion/XenMotion/live migration may not be able to respond quickly enough to changing network patterns to be effective. Perhaps it’s just my server-centric view showing itself, but it seems more “costly” (in terms of effort) to move servers around to match traffic flow than to just route the traffic accordingly.
  • CrossBow looks quite cool, but I’m having a hard time understanding the real business value. I am quite confident that my lack of understanding about CrossBow is simply a reflection of the fact that I don’t know enough about Solaris Containers or how Xen handles networking, but can someone help me better understand? What is the huge deal with Crossbow?
  • Jason Boche shares some information with us about how to increase the number of simultaneous VMotion operations per host. That information could be quite handy in some cases.
  • I had high hopes for this document on VMFS best practices, but it fell short of my hopes. I was looking for hard guidelines on when to use isolation vs. consolidation, strong recommendations on VMFS volume sizes and the number of VMs to host in a VMFS volume, etc. Instead, I got an overview of what VMFS is and how it works—not what I needed.
  • Users interested in getting started with PowerShell with VMware Infrastructure should have a look at this article by Scott Herold. It’s an excellent place to start.
  • Here’s a list of some of the basic things you should do on a “golden master” template for Windows Server VMs. I actually disagree with #15, preferring instead to let Windows manage the time at the guest OS level. The only other thing I’d add: be sure your VMDK is aligned to the underlying storage. Otherwise, this is a great checklist to follow.

I think that should just about do it for this post. Comments are welcome!

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Virtualization Short Take #22

Tuesday, November 11, 2008 in Virtualization by slowe | 5 comments

Despite the fact that I’m out of town this week at NetApp Insight, I wanted to go ahead and get out the latest installation of Virtualization Short Takes—my sometimes-weekly collection of interesting or useful links and tidbits.

  • Much ado has been made about VMware’s acquisition of Trango and the announcement of VMware MVP (Mobile Virtualization Platform). Rich Brambley has a great write-up, and I completely agree with Rich and Alex Barrett about what this really means: don’t expect to see Windows XP on your smartphone any time soon. Alex said it best: this is virtualization, not emulation, and Windows XP doesn’t run on ARM.
  • I’m curious—how many people agree with my comments in Alex’s article about the Citrix ICA client for the iPhone. Is there any real, actual value in being able to access a Windows session from your iPhone? I tend to think not, but it would be an interesting discussion. Speak up in the comments.
  • Duncan points out that the issue with adding NICs to a team and keeping them all active—the workaround for which required editing esx.conf—has now been fixed in ESX 3.5 Update 3. It’s now possible to add NICs using esxcfg-vswitch and there’s no need to edit esx.conf. Excellent!
  • If you haven’t yet checked out Leo’s Ramblings, go give it a look. He’s got some good content. It’s worth subscribing to the RSS feed (I did).
  • Rick provides a helpful tool to resolving common system management issues with VMware Infrastructure. Thanks, Rick!
  • Regular readers may recall that Chad Sakac of EMC and I had a round of VMware HA-related posts a few months ago (check out the VMwareHA tag for a full list of VMware HA-related posts). As part of that discussion there was lots of information provided about Service Console redundancy, failover NICs, secondary Service Console connections, additional isolation addresses…all sorts of good stuff. Duncan joined in the conversation as well with a number of great posts, and has been keeping it up since then. His latest contribution to the conversation is a comparison of using failover NICs vs. using a secondary Service Console to prevent VMware HA isolation response. According to the documentation, using a secondary Service Console can help reduce the wait time for VMware HA to step in should isolation actually occur. Good stuff, and definitely worth some additional exploration in the lab.
  • As a sort of follow-up to the discussion about using NFS for VMware, this VMware Communities thread has some great information on why the NFS timeouts should be increased in NetApp NFS environments. If you’re like me, you like to know the reasons behind the recommendations, and this thread was very helpful to me. Let me also add that we’ve recently started recommended to customers to increase their Service Console memory to 800MB when using NFS, so that might be something to consider as well.
  • Need to change the path of where Update Manager stores its patches? Gabe shows you how here.
  • Eric Gray of VCritial explores the question: what would things be like without VMFS? Well, as he states, you can just ask a Hyper-V user, since Hyper-V doesn’t (yet) have a shared cluster filesystem. Yes, that will change in 2010 with Shared Cluster Volumes in Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V 2.0. I know. Or you can just add Melio FS from Sanbolic today and get the same thing. This is not anything new to me; I discussed this quite extensively here and here. Now, what would really be interesting is for VMware to work with Sanbolic to co-develop a more advanced version of VMFS that eliminates the SCSI reservation problems…
  • Need a nice summary of the various network communications that occur between different components of a VI3 implementation? Look no further than right here. Jason’s site is another one that’s worth adding to your RSS reader.
  • If you really like living on the edge, here’s a collection of some RPMs for VMware ESX 3.5. Keep in mind that installing third-party RPMs like this is not recommended or supported…
  • Andy Leonard picked up the DPM video by VMware and is looking forward to DPM no longer being experimental. What he’d really like, though, is some feature to move his VMs via Storage VMotion and spin down idle disks. Andy, I wouldn’t hold my breath.
  • If you are a Fusion user (if you own a Mac and need to run Windows, you should be a Fusion user!), this hint might come in handy.
  • Eric Siebert has a good post on traffic flow between VMs in various configuration scenarios—different vSwitches, same vSwitches, different port groups, same port groups, etc. Have a look if you are at all unclear how VMware ESX handles traffic flow.

That does it for this round. Speak up in the comments if you have any interesting or useful links to share with other readers. I’d also be interested in readers’ thoughts on the whole Citrix on the iPhone discussion—will it really bring any usefulness?

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VMware Expands SVVP Certifications

Wednesday, October 15, 2008 in Microsoft, Virtualization by slowe | 1 comment

As I discussed a few weeks ago, VMware’s original SVVP certification was limited to x86 guests with up to 4GB of RAM running on AMD Opteron-based systems. So, while VMware was the first third-party hypervisor validated under SVVP, their validation was a bit limited.

Thanks to Mike DiPetrillo via Twitter, I learned that VMware’s SVVP validation has now been expanded to include the following:

  • Both AMD Opteron and Intel-based systems
  • Both x64 and x86 guests
  • Validation of x64 guests running up to 16GB of RAM

The full list is found here.

Unfortunately, x86 guests are still limited to 4GB of RAM, but I don’t really foresee that being a major problem as I suspect the vast majority of x86 guest workloads will have 4GB or less of RAM.

Let’s hope that VMware continues to expand the SVVP certifications to include more processors (currently limited to 4 CPUs, which I’m guessing is 4 vCPUs) and more memory for both x86 and x64 workloads. Right now VMware’s list of SVVP certifications is trounced by Citrix’s list, which boasts higher CPU and higher RAM limits.

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