The last few months I have been busy designing, building and testing a new VMware View solution for our own Support Center. In this Support Center we do support and system administration for some of our biggest clients. One of the challenges is the use of desktop hardware and the limited space of a call agent’s or administrator’s desk. Many of my colleagues support  multiple client sites and need different PCs for each client. So in 2008 one of my respected colleagues thought of a great solution and advised to implement a VMware VDI solution.

The idea was to create a pool of virtual desktops for each client site and supply the call agents and system administrators with a standard physical desktop with which they can access one or more virtual desktops and do the standard office work (Word, Outlook, etc) at the same time. Saving space needed for all those desktops and minimizing heat, power, etc and improving the working conditions in the process.

We bought four DELL PowerEdge 2950 II’s with two quad core CPUs and 64GB of memory each and a DELL EqualLogic 5000E iSCSI SAN to build this all virtual VDI solution.

One of the biggest challenges was to separate all client networks, so we assigned VLANs to all of them. But this raised a new challenge as I discovered during the implementation. Because we assigned all client their own VLAN and there was no routing between them, how can we connect to the virtual desktops.

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Update April 22th 2009: Today the rumor mentioned below was confirmed during the vSphere 4 launch.

Rumor in the VMware community has it that the next version of VMware ESX, vSphere, has very limited support for the VMware management and automation suite. vSphere will of course be available with vCenter for basic management and automation tasks but the rest of VMware’s great product suite is not supported in the initial release of vSphere.

So there won’t be support for:

• VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager
• VMware vCenter Lab Manager
• VMware vCenter Lifecycle Manager
• VMware vCenter Stage Manager
• VMware View

In my opinion this is a mistake. I understand the pressure is on and VMware should  release a new version fast to challenge the competition. But releasing a product which does not support the majority of your former product suite is not a clever move.

From what I understand this is also a discussion within VMware so let’s hope VMware gets wiser and postpones the release or add support for the VMware Management & Automation suite soon.

We already reported on this and even made a video of Scott Herold’s demo at VMworld Europe 2009 in Cannes, the Virtualization EcoShell Initiative, VESI for short.The Virtualization EcoShell Initiative is a new Vizioncore-sponsored community initiative being led by virtualization expert and author Scott Herold. The goal of The VESI community is to further enhance the administrative experience of virtual infrastructures with automation using Windows PowerShell.

Now Scott Herold announced the release date, April 15th. This is the date that THE “Power Toolkit” for virtualization administration will be generally available 100% free of charge.

You can get more information or download the tool at TheVESI.org or visit VMGuru.com

Title: Webcast: Choosing the Right Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Platform
Location: Online
Link out: Click here
Description: Companies today face a myriad of factors when evaluating a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) platform. In this session, we will explain what sets VMware View™, the next-generation VDI solution from VMware, apart from the competition, giving you a glimpse of the unique features and technologies of VMware View, and contrasting them to those offered by other vendors.
Start Time: 18:00
Date: 2009-04-09
End Time: 20:00

Today my twitter popped up and I saw a retweet from Duncan Epping pointing to an article on VInternals. Duncan added a warning ‘Please sit down before reading my latest post‘, this caught my attention.

I read the article and I must say, this is a MUST READ for all virtualization architects, admins, decision makers!

The article, published January 2009, contains information directly from employees from Microsoft explaining the design considerations in relation to Hyper-V. Make sure you’re sitting down when you read the excerpts, are somewhere private like your own home, and have the bathroom door open and an Ambulance on hold. Because it is very likely you will piss yourself laughing.

This article is the next article in a long sequel of Microsoft Hyper-V vs VMware ESX articles, like:

• ESX vs Hyper-V mythbusting myth
• VMware releases a cost per application calculator
• Hyper-V, not in my datacenter!
• VMware ESX vs Microsoft Hyper-V

VMware dedicated a blog to this so called Microsoft mythbusting, you can find it here.

Title: Technical Track: Demo of DR Testing with VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager
Location: online
Link out: Click here
Description: In this webcast, we will provide a live demo of the disaster recovery (DR) testing features of VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager. This solution makes DR testing much more reliable and realistic by automating testing in a way that is non-disruptive to the production environment.

Start Time: 19:00 (GMT+2) / 11:00 (PST)
Date: 2009-04-08
End Time: 20:00 (GMT+2) / 11:00 (PST)

Note: Please double check the time on the VMware webcast page. Timezones, daylight saving differences etc makes it hard to get the time right.

Title: Webcast: Intro to Virtualization
Location: Online
Link out: Click here
Description: Virtualization is a proven software technology that is rapidly transforming the IT landscape and fundamentally changing the way people compute. You may ask yourself, who should use virtualization? Why should you use it? How does it work? What does it do? Why do more than 100,000 IT organizations worldwide rely on VMware technology to solve complex business challenges? This webcast provides a basic overview to virtualization solutions from VMware and explains the technology that enables virtualizations, as well as the features and benefits of VMware solutions.
Start Time: 21:00 (GMT+2) / 11:00 (PST)
Date: 2009-04-08
End Time: 22:00 (GMT+2) / 11:00 (PST)

Note: Please double check the time on the VMware webcast page. Timezones, daylight saving differences etc makes it hard to get the time right.

In the last week these items are added or edited in VMware’s Knowledgebase at http://kb.vmware.com

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Last March I wrote an article on vendors  trying to market their products by bashing the competition and not having a clean discussion. At that moment I thought ‘Am I the only one making this into a problem?’  Today I read a great post by Gabrie van Zanten of Gabes Virtual World and it seems I am not alone!

Gabrie watched a video on Microsoft’s Virtualiztion Team Blog in which two gentlemen try to bust 10 VMware ESX vs MS Hyper-V myths. I intentionally use the word ‘try’ because they do a pretty terrible job.

They compare the current release of VMware ESX 3.5 to the R2 version of Microsoft’s Hyper-V which still has to be released (release 2010(?)). Now this is something that sounds familiar, this is exactly what I commented on in this article. Citrix comparing VMware and Citrix HA and not explaining that Citrix HA is Live Migration. If the MS gentlemen want to do some real mythbusting, try comparing VMware ESX 3.5 U4 to Microsoft Hyper-V 1.0 (both out now) or compare VMware ESX4/vSphere to Microsoft Hyper-V 2.0 (both not publically available yet).  But I think they’re too chicken to do that and they are right. Microsoft would come out way behind if you do a real comparison and claiming to have an enterprise ready hypervisor.

In my opinion in these kind of marketing campaigns you can recognize good vendors/product from bad ones. When you are not operating out of your own strengths and weaknesses but need to stoop down to bashing the competition to try to look good, you’re a myth yourself.

Want to see what all the fuss is about read the complete article in which Gabrie busts some mythbuting himself, look here!

So , Gabrie thanks, I’m not alone any more

Title: Webcast: Sneak Peek: VMware vCenter Chargeback
Location: online
Link out: Click here
Description: Join the VMware Chargeback team as they describe how VMware vCenter Chargeback will deliver a simple cost accounting structure for the virtualized environment in 2009. Using an allocation or utilization model (or perhaps both in combination), administrators will now have the ability to report on costs across storage, CPU, I/O and many other categories. In addition, fixed costs and additional metrics can be defined to truly provide a transparent chargeback model that can produce specific billing for organizational units within a business. This webcast will also have a product demo.
Start Time: 19:00 (GMT+2) / 09:00 (PST)
Date: 2009-04-07
End Time: 20:00 (GMT+2) / 10:00 (PST)

Note: Please double check the time on the VMware webcast page. Timezones, daylight saving differences etc makes it hard to get the time right

It is now April and in October 2008, 6 months ago, we started our own virtualization blog. I registered a funny domain name when applying for a private domain name and Anne Jan, Edwin, Alex and I started this website just for the fun of it.

In the beginning the blog was intended to share our knowledge and experiences with colleagues who work throughout the Netherlands but very soon we attracted the attention of VMware enthusiasts all over the world.

At the end of December the number of hits grew from 80.000 (October) to almost 200.000 hits per month and we started getting positive responses. We then decided to try to walk and talk with the big boys like Erik Sloof, Gabrie van Zanten, Mike Laverick, Scott Herold, Duncan Epping, Richard Garsthagen, etc. The plan is/was to post our real life experiences and bring you as much VMware related news as possible. A part of this was to do a live report from VMworld Europe in Cannes with photos and videos.

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Title: Webcast: Sneak Peek: VMware vCenter AppSpeed
Location: online
Link out: Click here
Description: Due for release in 2009, this Application Performance Monitoring product will provide unparalleled insight into the performance of multi-tier applications. In this webcast, we will cover both how the technology can be used to perform an “Assured Migration” of an application from physical to virtual, as well as how VMware Infrastructure administrators can guarantee quality of services to an organization’s application owners.
Start Time: 19:00 (GMT+2) / 09:00 (PST)
Date: 2009-04-02
End Time: 20:00 (GMT+2) / 10:00 (PST)

Note: Please double check the time on the VMware webcast page. Timezones, daylight saving differences etc makes it hard to get the time right.

After many complaints from the community VMware finally gave in and renamed their next generation ESX, formerly known as vSphere, to vCloudOS. We at VMGuru.nl already complained at the end of 2008 about the new name and many other did the same. Some even claimed that VMware couldn’t have registered the name vSphere as it was owned by another company.

Despite the fact that VMware publically used vSphere as their new name for their virtual infrastructure at VMworld Europe 2009 in Cannes they now changed it.

According to VMware´s spokesman Faril Polos, ´The new name better reflects the role, the opportunities and VMware’s strategy for our line of Virtual Datacenter products.’

For more information visit the VMware website or look here.

Last week a collegue asked how big the initial database for VirtualCenter should be and how much it grows.  He also needed to know much diskspace he needed to reserve for the database.

Since we have to do this more often I thought it would be handy to collect the various calculation sheets here.

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