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Republished: FlexClones or Deduplication?

Friday, July 3, 2009 in Storage, Virtualization by slowe | 5 comments

Author’s Note: This content was first published over at Storage Monkeys, but it appears that it has since disappeared and is no longer available. For that reason, I’m republishing it here (with minor edits). Where applicable, I’ll also be republishing other old content from that site in the coming weeks. Thanks!

I’ve discussed this topic before, but I felt like it was a topic that needed to be revisited again. Storage admins need to know how their choices in storage technologies may or may not impact virtualization efforts, and this particular choice—leveraging pointer-based snapshots or deduplication—is particularly important.

FlexClones Versus Deduplication with VMware Infrastructure

A number of times over the last few months, I’ve run into situations where NetApp’s FlexClone technology was being heavily pitched to customers interested in deploying, or expanding their deployment of, VMware Infrastructure.

In case you aren’t familiar with the use of NetApp FlexClones in conjunction with VMware Infrastructure, have a look at these earlier articles of mine:

How to Provision VMs Using NetApp FlexClones
NetApp FlexClones with VMware, Part 1
NetApp FlexClones with VMware, Part 2
LUN Clones vs. FlexClones

Now, after you’ve read all those articles (you did read them, didn’t you?), it should be fairly clear that using FlexClones can be very advantageous. However, those advantages come with some tradeoffs as well, most notably in the complete and total lack of integration with VMware Infrastructure itself.

This lack of integration means that users can’t use VirtualCenter templates, because the cloning is taking place at the storage array instead of within VMware Infrastructure. This also means that customers can’t apply customization specifications during the cloning process, so users will need to create their own Sysprep answer files and manually Sysprep the VMs before invoking the FlexClone process. Users are required to create scripts and tools to do simple things like using the VM name for the guest OS name during cloning. (Author’s note: many of these issues have been addressed by NetApp’s Rapid Cloning Utility (RCU), which provides some integration into VirtualCenter.)

Deduplication, on the other hand, works seamlessly with VMware Infrastructure. This is primarily because the details of the deduplication are completely hidden; it all occurs “inside the box.” Nothing needs to be configured within VirtualCenter; no VMs need to be modified. The NetApp storage system handles the details of the deduplication process itself, and VMware Infrastructure just consumes the storage.

Looking at these two technologies in that light, one might ask: why use FlexClones at all? If deduplication works seamlessly with VMware Infrastructure and FlexClones don’t, then why bother? To be honest, there are some instances where FlexClones make sense—even with the lack of integration. Consider some of the examples listed below.

  • In instances where a user needs to deploy lots of VMs in a very rapid fashion, FlexClones are much better. If time-to-deployment is the #1 driving factor, then FlexClones are the way to go. This could be particularly applicable and useful in VDI situations, as long as the broker doesn’t mandate handling provisioning itself (like VDM does).
  • In environments where provisioning and re-provisioning occurs on a frequent, regular basis, then FlexClones make sense. Even though large numbers of VMs aren’t being provisioned, the time saved on frequent re-provisioning via FlexClones will not be insignificant.
  • In situtations where there isn’t sufficient storage for the VMs before they are deduplicated, FlexClones may be a better option. Deduplication is post-process, meaning that storage will be needed for the full datasets until deduplication runs. In situations where that isn’t an option, then FlexClones can provide the same end benefit.

Personally, I’m of the opinion that unless an organization meets one of these criteria, then that organization should look to deduplication instead of FlexClones. Of course, that’s just my personal opinion, and I’m open to hear what others have to say about the matter. NetApp gurus, feel free to weigh in.

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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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Desktop Virtualization Interview with Eric Hanselman of Leostream

Monday, April 27, 2009 in Virtualization by slowe | 6 comments

Continuing on in our series of executive interviews, next up we have Eric Hanselman, Director of Professional and Technical Services for Leostream. Eric and I discussed the current state of desktop virtualization and what may be keeping organizations from fully adopting desktop virtualization.

The Interview

blog.scottlowe.org (BSL): Experts and analysts have been predicting for the last couple of years “this year is the year of desktop virtualization.” Do you think is true for 2009? Why or why not?

Eric Hanselman (EH): There are a number of influences that are converging to push VDI forward this year. Desktop refresh efforts have been holding for some time, and there’s been a significant pause before moving to Windows Vista. With the official close of easy Windows XP purchasing, organizations have been prodded into considering next steps.

At the same time, virtualization infrastructures have matured. IT teams are moving out of the frenzied times of server virtualization and are now seeing the operational benefits that it brings. Economic drivers such as consolidation and mergers are pushing a greater demand for cost reduction. And to top it all off, client and viewing solution offerings in s have matured. The result is that very capable VDI solutions can now be built that address the needs of the enterprise.

BSL: Do you feel that adoption of desktop virtualization is accelerating? If so, what factors do you think are driving the increased rate of adoption? If not, what factors are slowing it down?

EH: Yes, we see adoption accelerating. There are two main drivers of accelerated adoption of virtual desktops: compliance and operational efficiency. The compliance aspect is driven by a growing desire to prevent data loss and more stringent data access requirements driven by increasingly sophisticated auditors. VDI is a great way to manage and control where critical data flows in the organization.

On the operational efficiency front, VDI has the ability to significantly reduce operating expenses by centralizing desktop maintenance and reducing desk-side support needs.

BSL: If you had to pick the top three challenges that absolutely must be addressed in order for an organization to be successful in a desktop virtualization implementation, what would those challenges be?

EH: First would be managing the end user experience of moving to VDI. The most successful implementations address end user concerns by making the VDI experience as much like traditional desktop as possible. This includes keeping the user authentication process the same (no additional logins), delivering screen layouts that behave in the same way that physical do (splitting, rather than spanning multiple display systems), and giving the best possible display performance.

The second would be to address the structural and political aspects of VDI in the organization early in the implementation cycle. VDI touches many different aspects of IT operations. It brings the desktop realm into tight integration with the server and storage infrastructure. This means that two groups that don’t often work together (in larger enterprises, at least) find themselves working together very closely. Issues around policy management and control will definitely arise. Savvy project leaders will address these issues early on, before they can become a significant problem.

The third is to understand the changes required when an organization moves from relatively simple proof of concept tests to full production deployment. Often, the requirements of the production deployment aren’t fully explored in early testing. For example, functionality such as end user authentication and integration into the production authentication environment aren’t examined and delineated in the first phases. Other issues, such as remote access are often left until late in the project, which can lead to unpleasant surprises in the transition from pilot to production.

BSL: Technical folks love to debate the merits of the various transport protocols (RDP, ICA, ALP, etc.) In your opinion, how important is the transport protocol as part of the overall solution?

EH: Very important. The transport of the viewing protocol is a critical design decision in any VDI project. Different viewing technologies have varying strengths and weaknesses. Successful implementations embrace the ability to match the right viewing protocol to the correct end-user environment. A viewing protocol that works well on a local network connection may perform poorly in a more challenging network environment.

The Closing

I can attest that I, too, have seen an increase in interest around desktop virtualization, although that doesn’t necessarily match up to an increase in actual deployments. What about you, the readers? How does desktop virtualization play into your short-term and long-term plans? Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.

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Linux VDI and Mobile VM Admin

Monday, March 16, 2009 in Linux, Virtualization by slowe | 2 comments

In all the noise surrounding Cisco UCS, a couple of other smaller news releases were drowned out.

Leostream has partnered with NoMachine that will see Leostream integrating NoMachine’s NX protocol into their connection broker in order to support Linux-based virtual hosted desktops. You can read the full news release is here or here. This will allow Leostream to try to gain ground on VMware View by supporting not only Windows-based hosted virtual desktops, but also virtual desktops running Linux. I think this is a good move by Leostream to further differentiate themselves from market leader VMware, but whether it will be enough to make a difference is another story.

Also today, Rove released version 4.2 of their Mobile Admin product, a product designed to allow administators to manage their infrastructure from the ever-present mobile device. The press release is available here. Rove offered to provide a trial for me to use, but as they don’t yet offer a native iPhone version of Mobile Admin, I had to decline. (Rove is quick to point out that you can use Mobile Safari on the iPhone to access the web version of their application, however. Personally, I prefer native applications.) Mobile Admin is available for the BlackBerry and for Windows Mobile. If you’re in need of some sort of mobile administration solution, this might fit the bill. I’d love to hear from some readers who have used this product—is it good?

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Blasts from the Past

Thursday, January 1, 2009 in General, Macintosh, Virtualization by slowe | No comments

I was visiting Unclutterer and saw them sharing older content from the site in a similar fashion. So, I thought I might try it here. Enjoy some of these “blasts from the past”!

One Year Ago on blog.scottlowe.org

LACP with Cisco Switches and NetApp VIFs
Hyper-V Architectural Issue
Latest VDI Article Published

Two Years Ago on blog.scottlowe.org

Bookmark Spam?
Personal Computing as a Collection of VMs?
Application Agnosticism

Three Years Ago on blog.scottlowe.org

Mac OS X and .local Domains
WMF Flaw Exploit Grows Worse
Complete Linux-AD Authentication Details

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Virtualization Short Take #21

Monday, November 3, 2008 in Virtualization by slowe | No comments

Virtualization Short Take #21 is a collection of press releases, news announcements, and other links that have been collecting in my inbox over the past couple of weeks.

  • CohesiveFT has announced VPN-CubedTM, which is touted as “an encrypted virtual private network (VPN) enabling customer-controlled security inside a single cloud, across multiple clouds, and between clouds and private infrastructure.” The full press release is here. Security within and between clouds is a key challenge that has yet to be addressed by any vendor, so if CohesiveFT’s claims are true then they have something quite useful on their hands.
  • Leostream and eG Innovations have apparently teamed up to give eG Innovations better visibility into the Leostream Connection Broker software. I would direct you to a web site that provides full details about this announcement, but eG Innovations’ news/press release page hasn’t been updated since the middle of September. Oops. (Update: The site has been updated now after being completely unavailable earlier today, 11/5/2008. Apparently eG moved their web site and ran into a few problems making sure the latest content was migrated. Oops again.)
  • vmSight has published a survey about virtualized desktops based on information gathered during VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas. More information about the survey and a link to the actual report itself is available from vmSight’s web site.
  • Research firm Ideas International has prepared a “functional evaluation” of the three major server virtualization platforms on the market—VMware Infrastructure 3, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Citrix XenServer 5.0. The evaluation is available here, but readers must register for a free account in order to actually see the results.

That’s it for now; this time around it’s short and sweet. Feel free to add your comments with any news or links you found useful recently. Thanks!

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Virtualization Short Take #19

Tuesday, October 14, 2008 in Virtualization by slowe | 4 comments

Virtualization Short Take #19 is here, with news, headlines, and commentary on a few things that have passed my way over the last few weeks. Feel free to share your own interesting tidbits in the comments!

  • Rick Blythe, aka VMwarewolf, regales us with a tale of a new “feature” in VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 2. This new feature prevents VM migrations when putting a VMware ESX server into maintenance mode if it will violate the VMware HA failover level. Users will need to disable VMware HA in order to restore the pre-Update 2 functionality. (Anyone know if this has been addressed in VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 3?)
  • This VMware KB article is quite interesting; note the excerpt under the “Purpose” section of the article:
     

    VMware recommends storing your swap on a VMFS3 volume, when running virtual machines on NFS storage.

    So, even when running your VMs on NFS, VMware still recommends running the VM swap files on a VMFS3 volume. Very interesting, indeed. This is particularly interesting to NetApp, who—some would say rightly so—heavily pushes NFS for VMware storage.

  • Also from VMwarewolf, a note about guest customization failing with VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 2. Again, anyone know if this has been addressed with Update 3?
  • Microsoft has released a hotfix for Hyper-V failover clustering that improves functionality and adds VM control. An article at Hypervoria initially alerted me to this hotfix; a full Microsoft KB article is also available.
  • Ben Armstrong aka Virtual PC Guy provides a couple of scripts—in VBScript and PowerShell—for creating a dynamic VHD file.
  • Again via Ben, it looks as if Symantec has added support for Hyper-V to Backup Exec 12.5. That’s interesting, because I asked about Hyper-V support back in June at Tech-Ed and was told “as market demands dictate”. Is market demand now dictating?
  • Duncan alerts us to a potential failure of Storage VMotion after changing the Service Console IP address. I personally haven’t seen this behavior, but the fix is handy to know just in case.
  • Looking for a way to make mass changes to some VMX files? Luckily for you, the VI Toolkit blog has some information that you might find useful.
  • Brian Madden has a good overview of “View Composer” as it was described a few weeks ago at VMworld. Toward the end of the article, Brian mentions that VMware hasn’t announced anything with regard to user profiles:
     

    While that sounds noble, it also is a bit at odds with the longer-term vision that VMware CEO Paul Maritz outlined in the VMworld keynote, namely, that VMware wants to focus on deploying a personality to a user, not to a device. Certainly View Composer goes a long way in centrally managing desktops, but I wouldn’t be surprised if VMware does more in the user personalization space in the future as well.

    As Warren Ponder points out in the comments, there are several ways to handle user profiles, and it does sound like VMware already has some irons in the fire to help address that particular concern.

  • This has been pointed out in numerous places around the web, but who can fault one more link? Mike DiPetrillo of VMware has re-created Hyper-V’s Quick Migration functionality using PowerShell. I could go somewhere with this, but I think I’ll just leave it alone.

I guess that will do it for this time around. Again, feel free to share links or tidbits you found interesting in the comments below.

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VD2422: Offline VDI

Wednesday, September 17, 2008 in Virtualization by slowe | 2 comments

This is VD2422, and the presenter is Chris Leroy from VMware.

I arrived at this session late (about 15 minutes late) after running into a customer in the Solutions Exchange. This session is about offline VDI, which is the ability for users to check out VMs and run them while disconnected from the “traditional” VI environment.

As I came in, the presenter was showing off the check-out process, in which the user uses the VDM Client to check out a VM. As part of that check out process, the VM is copied to the client. Depending upon the size of the VM, this may take some time. VI administrators will also see a variety of tasks that get spawned as a result of checking out a VM, and controls for that VM such as pause, resume, power off, power on, etc., are all disabled while the VM is checked out.

The menus in the VDM Client are context-sensitive; the menus change from “Check Out” to “Check In” depending upon the status of the VM. Other commands may also appear based on the status of the check-in/check-out process itself. For example, there is a “Cancel Check Out” during the process of checking out a VM.

VirtualCenter uses snapshots as a “checkpoint” for the check-out/check-in process. By using snapshots in this way, the check in process is incremental, meaning that only the changed data needs to be transmitted back to the VI environment.

One thing that I didn’t see during the check-in/check-out demos and description was the use of the “fast start” VMDK streaming technology that was discussed last year in San Francisco at VMworld 2007.

Next the presenter showed how to use policy to control access to checking out a VM. For example, an administrator can set a policy that prevents a user from checking in an offline VM; in this instance, the user essentially has to “throw away” changes made while the VM instance was offline.

In addition, the offline VM functionality uses encryption technology—presumably taken from VMware’s ACE product offering—to secure the data while it is outside the VI environment. Even the client-side UI looks exactly like stuff taken from VMware ACE and VMware Player. (This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, by the way; it shows that VMware is leveraging additional products, like they should.)

The presenter was using a variety of video clips to demonstrate the functionality; in the next clip, he showed the VDM Connection Server being shutdown to simulate a user actually being disconnected or away from the corporate network. In this instance, the VDM Client recognizes that it no longer has a connection to VDM and certain actions are disabled as a result.

Getting into the technical details, the offline VM is a full copy of the VM that is encrypted using 128-bit AES encryption. Authentication through VDM Client is required; you can’t run the VM in ACE, Player, or Workstation, and it can only run on the client device to which it was copied.

Access to an offline desktop is controlled via Active Directory and entitlements. VDM includes policies to control offline desktops; these policies include whether or not a VM may even be checked out, how long a VM may remain checked out until it needs to contact the VDM server, whether or not USB devices or printing is allowed, whether a user is allowed to perform a rollback, or whether Single Sign On is permitted.

Regarding VDM authentication (note that VDM authentication is required in order to run the offline desktop), the VDM client creates an offline challenge built on the last successful online authentication. I’m glad the presenter discussed that; I was wondering how that would be handled.

As expected, the VDM client will periodically try to reconnect and update policies.

When authentication occurs offline (using the offline challenge), a full online authentication may be required in order to perform sensitive operations. Authentication using RSA, for example, might be required after an offline authentication once connectivity is re-established.

Offline VDI uses a stripped down version of VMware Player, and requires the full Win32 VDM Client (you can’t use the web interface). On the server side, VMs are locked when they are checked out. VDM also knows how to speak to VI, but APIs had to be extended to allow check-in/check-out and to build logic around how to handle checked-out desktops.

Data is transferred using the same VMware internal protocol that VMware Converter and VI cloning/provisioning uses when data is transferred between the client and a VMware ESX server. Only changed blocks are transferred, although some file system optimizations are used. There is some support for data compression, can be paused or resumed, and can travel inside SSL via the VDM Secure Gateway.

When multiple transfers are in place, the load is balanced across VMware ESX server according to a calculation of “transfer slots”. VMware ESX servers can be configured with how many transfer slots they are given.

The flow of a checkout request:

  • Client sends a checkout request
  • VDM server validates the request (checks the policies, verifies the disk space that the client needs, qualifies the VM configuration)
  • VDM then powers down the VM, takes a snapshot of the VM, enumerates the data that the client needs, and the generates a new VM configuration based on the existing VM on the VI environment
  • The client merges the new offline desktop configuration with any existing configuration
  • The client transfers the data it needs, as determined by the enumeration process earlier

A check-in request is a bit simpler:

  • Enumerate the data in the offline desktop’s disks that need to be transferred back to the server
  • Transfer the data back to the server
  • Remove the lock on the desktop

There are a few limitations. Only Windows XP is supported, and small number of concurrent check-ins and check-outs are supported. There is no support for non-persistent desktop pools, and there is no support for View Composer (Scalable Virtual Image, or SVI).

For future enhancements, VMware is considering the use case when the user primarily works from the client desktop. In this instance, check-in processes are more likely to be background processes that should be initiated automatically. These are essentially considered to be restore points or for alternative access. This use case could extend the reach of VDI quite extensively.

More future work is being spent on integration between offline VDI and View Composer. Finally, consideration is being given to allowing offline VDI to work on platforms other than Windows, such as Mac OS X or Linux (note that earlier it was stated that the Win32 VDM Client is required for offline VDI).

At this point, the presenter closed the session.

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Very Brief Thoughts on the Keynote

Wednesday, September 17, 2008 in Virtualization by slowe | 4 comments

Now that the keynote has wrapped up, I just wanted to post a few very brief thoughts, perhaps questions, about the keynote and the technologies and initiatives discussed.

First off, as I have seen others point out on the VMworld Twitter broadcast channel, I wonder how well AppSpeed’s remediation functionality would work with applications other than web-based applications. Not all applications can scale using additional VMs. Sure, you can generally scale web-based applications by throwing on more web server VMs, but what about Microsoft Exchange 2007? Or SQL Server 2008? Or some other database server? I speculated in the keynote liveblog that perhaps the hot-add functionality that VMware is supposed to be adding to future versions of ESX/ESXi will help, but there’s been absolutely no discussion of that. At least, not that I’ve seen.

I also briefly mentioned in the keynote liveblog that I wonder how well some of these technologies would work in the offline VDI scenario.

Finally, there seems to be some feature/functionality conflicts between stuff like vStorage Thin Provisioning and VMware FT that have yet to be resolved. Granted, this is all prototype/pre-beta stuff so VMware has time to resolve this.

What about you? What kinds of things like this have you spotted?

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Virtualization Short Take #18

Tuesday, September 9, 2008 in Microsoft, Virtualization by slowe | 1 comment

Only a few little “bits and bytes” in this week’s Virtualization Short Take, as most of the activity seems to be involved in making product announcements. Product announcements are quite well handled on other sites, although I include them here from time to time. In any case, here a few links I found over the last week or so. I hope you find them interesting and useful.

  • Alessandro reported that Microsoft has an API for third-party connection brokers to leverage. More details and the original post are here. This just goes to underscore my belief that desktop virtualization will be the real battlefront between the major virtualization vendors, and this is an area where VMware has the least longevity. Consider the players: Microsoft, who makes the desktop operating systems being virtualized, and understands them better than anyone else; Citrix, who’s been delivering applications and desktops for years and years; and VMware, who has only really moved into the desktop space in the last couple of years. VMware does have some strengths in this area, no doubt, but their competitors are quite formidable.
  • A recent performance comparison between VMware ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V revealed some very interesting information. Network World, who conducted the comparison, ends up giving the nod to VMware ESX overall, but I was mildly surprised at how well Hyper-V did (I expected the numbers to be worse for Microsoft).
  • The market and the competition around display protocols really seems to be heating up. Via Alessandro, I learned that VDIworks will be supporting HP’s Remote Graphics Software (RGS), a high-performance remote display protocol that HP leverages in their workstation blade solutions. Add to that the work that VMware is doing on Net2Display, Qumranet’s (now Red Hat’s) work on SPICE, updates to RDP from Microsoft, and Citrix’s ICA protocol, and now suddenly you have quite a crowded remote display protocol market. If I were a betting man (which I’m not), I might be inclined to start a pool to see who wins.
  • Here’s something that may have gone unnoticed by many: VMware has released VMware Studio, a tool for allowing developers or ISVs to create and distribute their own virtual appliances in OVF (Open Virtualization Format). Thanks to Greg Lato for the news.
  • Duncan is on a bit of a VMware HA theme recently, with a couple of posts pointing out how to change the isolation response timeout and an update on the location of FT_HOSTS, an important portion of VMware HA’s operation. Be sure to have a look at these two articles.

That’s it for now. Keep in mind I’ll be liveblogging as much of VMworld 2008 as possible, and I’m considering adding Twitter to the mix as well; I haven’t decided. Let me know what additional forms of information you may find useful, if any, and I’ll see what I can add.

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