VMGuru.nl – I choose (a virtual) life!

The title of this blog post sounds a little bit funny maybe but in my opinion this is what’s happening right now. As we look what has happened in the past we all know what switch hardware vendors did to virtualize the network with the VLAN technology. Also do we remember and probably use some implementation of VPN.  This technologies were introduced a long time ago and everyone is using them the days. More recently a lot of new technologies were introduced to the market. Here is a quick overview of all the initiatives that came to my mind.

Processor: Intel® Virtualization Technology (VT) and AMD Virtualization (AMD-V™) are trying their best to off-load as much as possible of the virtualization overhead onto the processor.

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I just finished a great webinar by Randy Groves, Chief Technology Officer at Teradici Corporation.

The challenge for this and upcoming years is to give the most demanding users a true user experience while working on a true zero client through any network. The Teradici corporation is far ahead of the rest with their PCoIP protocol. No surprise VMware embraced the technology and the Teradici corporation by working together to answer the challenge.

The entire focus of the Teradici company is PCoIP, the DNA of the team working on the PCoIP protocol is from big and important companies like Broadcom, Intel, Nvidia and others.

Why should you want to use your graphics remotely you ask?
Several branch of industries choose for running graphics in the datacenter because of several reasons. For instance the healthcare industry and because of security, Media & Entertainment and CAD/CAM because of the enormous power they can use in a datacenter and efficient way of using resources and you can connect to it from anywhere. So designers aren’t convicted to 1 pDesktop, if that 1 breaks down it will be a big loss, instead they can use almost any device to do their work from anywhere connecting to their vDesktop or even vDesktops. Also branches like the Trading Floor, Air Traffic control and others who want space savings are using graphics remotely.

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

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During VMworld Europe 2009 in Cannes, VMware announced the vExpert program. Erik and Anne Jan both were awarded with a vExpert award for their effort and enthusiasm around virtualization and their community work.  Today, ta the end of the day a special delivery arrived at the office from overseas we had to sign for, bringing proof that we have 2 vExperts in our midst. Congrats guys, you earned it and you now have a nice paper to proof it. Keep up the good work and maybe you can prolong the vExpert status in 2010.

According to buzz in the blogosphere, last July VMware COO Tod Nielsen met with Charles Phillips President of Oracle with regards to the ongoing support issues/questions customers experience when using VMware virtualization technology.

Tod Nielsen providing Oracle with a list of over 500 VMware customers asking for Oracle to support their apps running on VMware. Charles appreciated this but stated that this is a challenges for him as he has not personally received this request from customers, and until he does, cannot see making this a priority for his team. So the bottom line is that Oracle doesn’t feel that many people run critical apps on Oracle in a Virtual environment.

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Project Virtual Reality Check finally posted a new document about previous results and possible clock drift when using the “Login Virtual Session Indexer (VSI)”.  Previous test setups and results didn’t take into account how different hypervisors handle passing time.

In my opinion this is a serious setback to Project VRC which is considered an institute in the virtualization world. People will start questioning the results when no new tests will be performed.

Below is a description from the Project VRC website explaining the new whitepaper they published on September 14th 2009. This is a must read for people that already did some testing as well as new tests. In short: ‘Because of Windows clock behavior in virtual machines the results were affected and some hypervisors may come out better than they really are.

This whitepaper is a review and reflection on previous Project VRC publications, the benchmark: “Login Virtual Session Indexer (VSI)” and Windows clock behavior within virtual machines.  This discussion is fueled by the fact that results from the individual Project VRC whitepapers are set side-by-side to compare hypervisors. Project VRC has been in discussion with both vendors and community, and performed additional research in this context. Before Project VRC can publish new results, it is important to address any questions, review the impact of this discussion and improve VSI where possible.

You can download it at www.projectvrc.nl

The major conclusions in this Whitepaper are:

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Now that the new version of VMware View is coming shortly I was investigating the new possibilities with our thin client providers. Wyse Technology which has a nice solution already for the View 3.1 platform now has a new Zero Client which is specially made for View 4.0.

What makes this Zero Client so special? This model support PCoIP. PCoIP is the answer from VMware to make a great user experience possible with VMware View. VMware partnered with Teradici to introduce the PCoIP technology into View.  The P20 not only uses the software implementation but the P20 also contains the hardware chip that Teradici uses in the PCI Card solution. Tested by Brain Madden a couple of month ago.  Also see this article at BrianMadden . Imagine the possibilities this solution can offer in your VDI environment.

When the Wyse P20 comes to EMEA is not yet clear, but I hope to find out more next month. We at VMGuru.nl will also try to get our hands on a P20 model so we can blog our experiences.

More info on:  http://www.wyse.com/products/hardware/zeroclients/P20/index.asp

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

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This week I attend the launch party from Trend Micro. They presented their latest products which are fully virtualization aware.

First they introduced the new way of defending viruses and malware. Because nowadays the viruses and malware changes signatures so quickly the signatures database grows also so quickly. In the long run the signatures database takes so much internal memory. Especially in virtual environments this becomes a waste of useful resources. Trend Micro is the first vendor that takes a different approach. Instead of keeping a signatures database on every machine (virtual or physical) they query a cloud based database which is always up to date and always up and running. It is more like a framework and it called Trend Micro™ Smart Protection Network.

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Where the development team of Windows 7 did it’s best to release the final version of the product before the holiday season of 2009, the enterprise boys of the MDOP team (Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack) weren’t that quick. MED-V, which is the desktop virtualization product by Microsoft and part of the MDOP suite, will not support Windows 7 in the next release, which is planned for October 2009. Instead, there will be a separate update in the first quarter of 2010  through release of a service pack (Med-V 1.0 SP1).

Read all details here.

Today we added a new blogger to VMGuru.nl!  Arjan van ‘t Hoff is a colleague from another division of Centric, Centric ITS.

Arjan is a great addition to VMGuru.nl because he works for another division of Centric which main focus is to sell hardware and software and hopefully this will add a new and fresh view.

We all hope to spot content from Arjan soon.

This morning we had a meeting with Vizioncore/Quest. Danny Claproth and Jan-Willem Koppers informed us on their complete range of vProducts.

Vizioncore offers a wide range of products which add additional features or deliver VMware-like features. I’ve not had very much time to test their products yet but I knew most of them by name and function. After attending Danny’s presentation I will definitely make time to check out their neat products.

The ones I will definitely check out are vFoglight, vOptimizer, vConverter and of course Virtualization EcoShell.

vFoglight
From what I saw vFoglight is a brilliant virtualization management solution which delivers performance-, capacity- and cost monitoring to improve resource utilization, recover costs and quickly find bottlenecks in your infrastructure.

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After becoming a VCP4 I regularly get questions from my colleagues on how to become a VCP4.

Can I take the VCP410 exam without further training?
I attended the VI3, Install & configure course but didn’t take the exam yet. Can I take the VCP exam instead?

Maureen Lonergan wrote a very neat article on this, ‘Ahead of the learning curve’

In this article Maureen talks about the various road which lead to VCP4 certification. In short?
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In the last week these items are added or edited in VMware’s Knowledgebase at http://kb.vmware.com

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Yesterday, the three of us attended one of the quarterly CDG⁽¹⁾ Technical update sessions which was held at ‘de Glazen Ruimte‘ in Maarssen.

The three subject were:

1. RES Software and VMware View by Bart van Winden (RES) en Ton Hermes (VMware);
2. Citrix reduces traffic jams on the roads to and from our Dynamic Delivery Center by Marc Wagevoort (CDG);
3. VMworld San Francisco 2009 update by Rob van der Wel.

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

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Just before VMworld 2009 Wyse released a great application for the iPhone called Wyse Pocket Cloud. It’s a great new application which enables you to connect to servers of desktops using RDP or VMware View.

So, what do you need and how can you get it? You need an iPhone 3G with a WiFi or 3G connection and today you can still download the application in the Apple Store for €15,99. This is a limited time promotional sale (30% off) for the week of VMworld.

Richard Garsthagen recorded a nice demo on VMworld which you can watch below.

Today I took my VCP410 exam, as announced earlier this week.
So I studied hard this week and …………….. succeeded!

My score was 344 points of max 400 500. Unfortunately that’s 86%, not enough to become a VMware Certified Instructor
(Edited after reading VCP on vSphere 4 Exam Scoring) Too bad but a pass is a pass ……

Compared to my VCP3 exam I found the exam to be quite difficult. It’s not an easy walk through exam, in and out in 20 minutes. But I don’t care, it’s ‘in the pocket’.

My exam preparation? Much hands-on experience, read the study guide and all related pdf’s and of course the ‘What’s new in VMware vSphere 4 course’ by NTPRO.nl-guru Eric Sloof.

VMGuru.nl widgetI finally got around to it: Installing the development tools for Mac OS X. After a couple of months using the Mac I now enter the world of development again.
One of the first things I tried was a dashboard widget with the VMGuru.nl RSS feed. I must say that for a first time (and with all 2 minutes I spent on it) it looks nice IMO.

I hope you enjoy it. If you got any problems, let me know.

File: VMGuru.nl widget

Yesterday we showed you how VMware designed and build an awesome infrastructure just for one week of VMworld 2009.

Awesome figures!
776 ESX servers,  37TB RAM, 6.208 cores, 348TB storage and 37.248 virtual machines. But what is this infrastructure used for?

Well VMware primarily uses it for the 10 different self paced labs they provide to VMworld participants. VMware build a vCloud which consists of the best of three solutions, vSphere, Lab Manager and a self service portal in which users can select the lab they want to follow and within minutes they get there own lab environment.

Depending one the wanted lab virtual machines can be provisioned within minutes, from 3 minutes for a simple two server lab environment to 7 minutes for a large nine server lab environment.

The system does not just provision basic virtual machines like Windows, but it provisions entire virtual ESX environments, with nested ESX server, storage, SRM and vCenter server.

If you want to know more just watch the interview Richard Garsthagen did below.

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Just as Microsoft is proud to present users with live migration in Hyper-V 2.0, VMware announces that it supports long distance VMotion up to 200 Kilometers. As a VMware Premier Partner we already heard this was coming but we never realized it would be available this soon.

Long distance VMotion is the first step in enabling cloud services, it provides customers with the possibility to move virtual machines from a private to a public cloud or vice versa or enable clients to ‘follow the sun/moon’ simply by VMotioning the virtual machines to a remote datacenter. It can also be used as a pre-SRM kind of tool by VMotioning a complete datacenter when you see there’s trouble coming (tornados/floods/etc).

Of course this great feature does not come without some limitations. You need a WAN connection with minimal 622Mb/s and a maximum latency of  5 ms.

Edit: Joep Piscaer from VirtualLifestyle.nl attended breakout session TA3105, Long distance VMotion, and wrote a great report and recorded a video which you can see/read here.

VMware announced their effort to produce a software implementation of PCoIP together with Terradici at VMworld 2009 in Cannes.

Since then I have been anxiously waiting for a demo or beta. During today’s keynote at VMworld 2009 VMware gave a demo of their long awaited PCoIP demo.

Joep Piscaer from VirtualLifestyle.nl made a video of this demo. Audio is bad and the image is a bit shakey but it gives a good impression of the PCoIP performance an d possibilities.

You can watch the video here.

I’m impressed by the performance and I can’t wait to get my hands on the beta. I’m curious what Brian Madden’s opinion is on this premiere as he was skeptical on VMware’s effort to produce a software implementation of PCoIP.

User profiles are a pain in the *. All to often profiles get corrupted by multiple sessions and logons are often slow.
RTO has a product for this: Virtual Profiles. This product solves a lot of problems with user profiles.

If you are going to use virtual desktops you will eventually end up with the same problem Terminal Server and Citrix users have had for a long time. But don’t worry, there is hope on the horizon:

AN FRANCISCO, Calif. – September 2, 2009 – Today at VMworld 2009, VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop through the datacenter and to the cloud, announced it has signed an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) agreement with RTO Software to integrate its industry-leading Virtual Profiles technology with VMware View™, the industry-leading enterprise desktop virtualization solution. The integrated offering will provide comprehensive user personality management and will enable VMware View customers to dynamically provision users, together with their profile, applications and data, across networks and devices. (See related press release also announced today: “VMware Leads in Virtual Desktops with VMware View™ – Simplifying Desktop Management, Lowering Costs and Enriching User Experience.”)

It is becoming a sequel, the datacenter VMware has build for this weeks VMworld 2009 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

In addition to our two previous articles (art1, art2), today we found two very nice videos loaded with tons of techno porno!

The first video shows the VMware team building the complete datacenter on-site at the Moscone Center. During the video footage the awesome numbers representing this huge infrastructure run by.

In short? 28 racks containing 776 ESX servers which provide the infrastructure with 37TB of memory, 6.208 CPU cores and 348TB storage which uses 528KW electricity and is servicing 37.248 virtual machines. You will probably never find such an infrastructure anywhere in the world, at least I know I won’t.

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I’m in IT for more then 12 years and during that period I learned, never to trust something another professional tells you. So as I am studying for my VCP410 exam, coming Friday, I came across the Virtual Machine configuration maximums. I saw the info at Simon Long’s blog, took his VCP vSphere 4 Practice Exam and also took notes.

When running through all configuration maximums I remembered the ‘never trust anyone‘ motto and as I’m in between project I thought it would be cool to check/confirm the presented maximums. Some seem so ridiculous that you can hardly believe them to be true.

After 10 minutes of editing the virtual machine configuration I got my ‘MAXVM‘ and I must say VMware delivers one awesome virtual machine. I can’t imagine anyone using a virtual machine which approaches these configuration maximums.

To sum it up:

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