VDI

From an e-mail I received regarding the announcement:

This morning Microsoft announced their intent to purchase Kidaro, a leading provider of desktop virtualization solutions for enterprises.

This is a significant announcement for both Microsoft and Kidaro with the potential to enable valuable new scenarios for customers leveraging the virtualization capabilities in the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack. The acquisition will allow Kidaro’s desktop virtualization technology to be added to the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack Microsoft (MDOP), allowing IT professionals to optimize their desktop infrastructure by providing management capabilities for Virtual PCs, streamlining OS deployments, and easing application compatibility issues. This is a key step in Microsoft’s strategy for delivering Dynamic IT virtualization capabilities from the desktop to the data center.

More information is available in this press release.

A friend of mine at Network Appliance was one of the presenters last year at VMworld 2007 for the now-famous presentation that showed a solution from Network Appliance where 100 VMs are created in just a couple of minutes. It’s great technology that is extremely useful in exactly those kinds of situations. I love it.

The video is so popular that it’s even been posted to YouTube. (By the way, did you know I’m on YouTube? My kids think that’s the greatest thing in the world, but I’m not so convinced.)

And, according to Manlio, it appears that they are showing off this kind of thing again at VMworld Europe 2008.

But it’s technology that’s not available yet.

Yep, that’s right. It’s not available yet. It’s based on new functionality, related to their existing FlexClone functionality (which I’ve blogged about before), that is due to be released very soon. Combine this new functionality with NFS on a NetApp storage system and you’ll be able to do exactly what NetApp is demonstrating. But not today…not until these new features are made available to the public.

That bothers me. I suppose it shouldn’t; I mean, you’ve got all sorts of vendors talking about their products and what their products can do when those products aren’t yet available. Microsoft Hyper-V is one example—it’s not available yet, won’t be until later this year, and yet Microsoft is showing it off. VMware is doing the same thing with the Continuous HA stuff they demo’ed at VMworld 2007. Likewise, VMware’s done the same thing this year with offline VDI and scalable virtual image technology.

So, if you’re thinking about a huge VDI deployment and planning on putting that on NetApp storage, that’s fine because there are plenty of other reasons to use Network Appliance—deduplication, anyone? But don’t plan on being able to take advantage of some of this highly touted functionality until it is publicly released.

UPDATE: Another colleague of mine at NetApp wrote me to clarify that the file-level cloning functionality demonstrated in the video is not, technically speaking, related to FlexClone functionality since FlexClone operates on a per-volume basis. I might argue that they both appear to exploit the same underlying functionality in WAFL, but I don’t know that for certain and at that point we’re splitting hairs anyway.

Back in 2006, I speculated that one day VMware would allow hosted virtual desktops to be “checked out” and used offline. Lo and behold, one of the announcements that has come out of VMworld Europe 2008 is just that very thing (quoting from VMware’s web site):

Offline Virtual Desktop Infrastructure previews how a single virtual desktop infrastructure platform may be able to support all enterprise PCs in the future. Let end users “check out” personalized virtual desktops running on VMware virtual desktop infrastructure to a notebook computer for use offline and then “check back in” to the same desktop running in their virtual desktop infrastructure environment.

Also coming out of VMworld Europe 2008 is the announcement of linked clones technology on the VI platform:

Scalable Virtual Image technology delivers lower operational costs through simple and scalable desktop image management and reduces storage requirements up to 90 percent for virtual desktop infrastructure environments. Quickly deploy, update, and publish desktop images to thousands of virtual machines.

This is powerful stuff. The offline VDI stuff really enables an entirely new way of thinking about VDI; it’s no longer about just hosting desktops at the datacenter. Now it’s about providing a “golden image” that users can run on the local machine when they’re not in the office and on the server farm when they are in the office.

Likewise, the scalable virtual image stuff addresses what is, in my mind, the #1 problem with VDI deployments: storage requirements. Vendors like Network Appliance have attempted to address this through their technologies like FlexClone (like described here); competitors such as Citrix have attempted to address this problem through technologies like Citrix Provisioning Server (formerly Ardence).

With these announcements, it’s now much clearer that VMware sees the desktop virtualization market is a very strategic market, and they are taking the steps to control that market.

My final article in the virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) series at SearchVMware.com has been published!

From the article, “Networks, host OSes strained by VMware VDI deployments”:

Deploying Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) on VMware Infrastructure 3 (VI3) can have a considerable impact on your network design and hosted operating system (OS) instances.

The article goes on to discuss specific ways in which the network and the guest operating systems have to be architected in a VDI deployment. I hope you find the information useful!

The fine folks over at SearchVMware.com have published another of my VDI articles, this one focusing on the connection broker’s integration into Active Directory:

The broker’s integration with a back-end directory service can play a significant role in many of the decisions regarding how a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environment is deployed in VMware Infrastructure 3 (VI3). In this tip, we’ll examine the integration between the connection broker and a commonly-used back-end directory service, Microsoft Active Directory.

Please go read the full article!

SearchVMware.com has published my latest VDI article, a closer look at the integration of the connection broker with VirtualCenter:

n my last article on virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), I discussed the three main components of a VDI solution: the virtualization servers and supporting infrastructure, the hosted operating system (OS) instances, and the connection broker. In this article, I’d like to take a more detailed look at the connection broker and some of the functionality that brokers provide in a VDI deployment.

A few more VDI-centric articles are in the works, so stay tuned here and to SearchVMware.com.  Thanks for reading!

The support that VMware VirtualCenter provides for using Sysprep to clone Windows virtual machines (VMs) is a key part of VMware’s quick provisioning functionality.  While VirtualCenter provides a means for creating unattended answer files (via Customization Specifications), it does not provide a way to allow users to customize the Sysprep.inf that is generated by VirtualCenter.  Of course, that is not to say that such customization isn’t possible, just that there isn’t a pretty graphical interface provided for it.  Fortunately, the process for customizing the Sysprep.inf isn’t too terribly difficult.

Using information provided by this Virtrix post, I managed to customize the Sysprep.inf.  A recent Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) project on which I was working called for VMs to have small Windows pagefiles, but Sysprep kept resetting the pagefile size to the default.  In this case, the default was much larger than the customer desired, so we needed a way to tell Sysprep not to resize the pagefile.

The first step in customize the Sysprep.inf is to decode the VBScript files used by VirtualCenter.  This script decoder works wonderfully, producing unencoded script files that can be easily edited.  Be sure to backup the original files first in the event you run into a problem!  Here’s the commands I used to decode the scripts, which are located in C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter 2.0\scripts:

move autoprep.wsf autoprep.wsf.backup
move gensysprepinf.vbs gensysprepinf.vbs.backup
scrdec18 autoprep.wsf.backup autoprep.wsf
scrdec18 gensysprepinf.vbs.backup gensysprepinf.vbs

First, I moved the originals to a backup file, then used the backup file as the source for decoding to a new file with the original name.

Once the files are decoded, you can then edit gensysprepinf.vbs to add or remove entries from the Sysprep.inf that is generated by VirtualCenter.  In Vincent’s example, he had to modify the default regional settings; in my case, I needed to change the behavior of Sysprep with regards to the pagefile.  I modified the following section:

outStr = “[Unattended]” & vbCrLf _
& “ OemSkipEula=Yes” & vbCrLf _
& “ InstallFilesPath=\sysprep\i386” & vbCrLf _
& “ KeepPageFile=1” & vbCrLf _

That last line “KeepPageFile=1”, was what I added to tell Sysprep to leave the existing pagefile alone.  That line isn’t perfect, though; this Microsoft KB article describes how it works.  In our case, it was enough.

Once that’s done, I had to edit autoprep.wsf to indicate that the gensysprepinf.vbs file is no longer encoded.  I had to edit the line that referenced gensysprepinf.vbs:

<script language=“VBScript”
src=“gensysprepinf.vbs”>

The key change here is from “VBScript.Encode” to “VBScript” for the language parameter.  This is detailed in Vincent’s post as well.  That’s it!  Of course, you could edit the scripts far more extensively, if so desired.

Thanks to Vincent for a great post; without his post, I wouldn’t have known where to start.  It also looks like Jase McCarty used the same technique in extending the VM’s root partition; although I didn’t read his paper I would guess the same mechanisms are involved.

Another VDI article I wrote has been published by SearchVMware.com:

In my last article on virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), I discussed the three main components of a VDI solution: the virtualization servers and supporting infrastructure, the hosted operating system (OS) instances, and the connection broker. In this article, I’d like to take a more detailed look at the connection broker and some of the functionality that brokers provide in a VDI deployment.

Go check out the full article!

Back at the start of October, about a month ago, I wrote about an exciting new opportunity that had recently opened up for me. I couldn’t really disclose any details at that time, but now that everything has finally materialized into reality I can share exactly what is happening.

So here’s the opportunity that I was talking about—I’m writing as a contributor for SearchVMware.com, a new TechTarget site focused on VMware virtualization. I am really excited about this! I’ve written three articles so far, all of which were published yesterday:

VDI on VMware Virtual Infrastructure: Using the three main components

In some aspects, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) takes the best of server-based computing and removes many of the drawbacks. Most people understand that the concept of VDI is using virtualization software, typically VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 (VI3), to host instances of a desktop operating system instead of a server operating system…

Configuring VLANs in VMware VI3 (Virtual Infrastructure 3)

The key to understanding VI3’s support for VLANs lies with the concept of a “VLAN trunk”. A non-trunk port—also called access port—carries traffic for a single VLAN, but a trunk port carries traffic for multiple VLANs simultaneously…

Authentication in a VMware VI3 Implementation

Many organizations that have implemented VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 (VI3), including both ESX Server and VirtualCenter, but do not have a firm grasp of how these components handle authentication…

More articles are in the works, so be sure to stay tuned to SearchVMware.com! And, if you have any suggestions for future articles that should be written, please let me know. Or, better yet, register at SearchVMware.com and let me know there too!

In the event you need to disable clipboard redirection and can’t (or don’t want to) use Group Policy within Active Directory, there are settings you can add to the default .RDP file for the Remote Desktop Connection client software that will prevent clipboard redirection.

In my particular case, I was working on a VDI project and we wanted to be sure that the connection broker (Leostream) disabled clipboard redirection for all hosted desktops.  The broker already supplied some basic settings for the RDP connections, but disabling clipboard redirection wasn’t there.  Fortunately, I found a site that had a listing of RDP file parameters (not from Microsoft, surprisingly!).  The listing isn’t annotated with explanations of each setting, but they are—for the most part—pretty self-explanatory.

To disable clipboard redirection, add the following to the .RDP file:

redirectclipboard:i:0

For the ActiveX RDP control, you would use this text:

MsRdpClient.AdvancedSettings2.RedirectClipboard = FALSE

I guessed on the ActiveX control configuration, but it worked.  I haven’t found that information documented anywhere just yet.

There are also Registry changes that can be made on the client to disable clipboard redirection (see here).  And, as I mentioned at the beginning of this post, you can also use Group Policy.