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

About two weeks ago I attended a session at the VMware User Group meeting here in the Netherlands about Project VRC.  After the presentation I asked myself: ‘What is the value of this project?‘.

For you who don’t know what Project VRC is:

“Project Virtual Reality Check (VRC) is a joint venture of Log•in Consultants and PQR, who have researched the optimal configuration for the different available hypervisors (hardware virtualization layers). The project arises from the growing demand for a founded advice on how to virtualise Terminal Server and Virtual Desktop (VDI) workloads. Through a number of researches, Log•in Consultants and PQR show you the scaling possibilities for Terminal Server environments as well as Virtual Desktops.” http://www.virtualrealitycheck.net/

Don’t get me wrong: What they did was a very good initiative, it showed the performance differences between different hypervisors. Although the results were not that surprising it was good to see the validation numbers of the things we already knew.

I also think that the guys who did the project where totally surprised by the attention vendors and customers gave to the project. It was an outstanding (marketing) tool to show the value of virtualization and especially XenApp on a hypervisor. Because of this attention the whole project got out of hand. Although this was not the goal of the project, vendors and customers used it as a reference guide for vitalizing XenApp. That’s the point where I started to wonder what the real value of the project VRC was.

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Based on the real life results when virtualizing XenApp I thought it was about time to summarize some of the best practices for virtualizing XenApp servers.

Why we DO want to virtualize XenApp?

1. For server consolidation:  vSphere enables scale up XenApp deployments;
2. For mixing server editions: 32-bit and 64-bit XenApp VMs can coexist;
3. For management: Better management through flexibility & isolation think about Change Management and VMware DRS;
4. For high availability and disaster recovery: VMware HA and vCenter Site Recovery Manager;
5. For less costs for server hardware, maintenance contracts, power, cooling, floor and rackspace.

Virtualizing XenApp servers is very complex. There are a lot more layers involved, like the type of hardware, the capabilities of the processor, the performance of the shared storage, the hypervisor used, the specific settings per hypervisor, operating system settings in a virtual environment, the XenApp settings in a virtual environment, the Workspace management settings in a virtual environment etc, etc.

In the following sections I tried to summarize some of the best practices we use in our projects:

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Almost every week I listen to the podcast from the Communities Round-table, just to make sure that I didn’t miss anything important.

What is this Communities Round-table? Well, who better than John Troyer, Sr Mgr VMware Communities, can explain what it is.

Each week, we’ll bring together experts and leaders from the VMware Communities and virtualization blogs to discuss the interesting topics in virtualization. Think of this as if it were a group meeting up at VMworld over a pint to chat about the latest news. We record the call and make it available for your pod cast listening pleasure. Listen with the player over on the right, download directly, or use the pod cast feed from TalkShoe.

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The VMGuru.nl crew wishes you a merry Christmas.

A couple of weeks ago I talked to a co-worker who is responsible for selling VMware licenses and other VMware related stuff. As a VMware partner it isn’t always easy to manage the licenses for customers nor selling or upgrading their licenses if they bought them from another partner in the past.

A lot of the times multiple people register VMware licenses. For example, if I am the person that has to request or register licenses I probably will do it with my own VMware account. If I leave the company the licenses still are connected to me as a person. I know you can use a general account and register your licenses with that, but that goes against anything I ever learnt about security and identity management.

If you already have licenses there is also no easy way to ‘push’ them to another account, for example a general account. You can do this through the support desk, but takes all kinds of effort.

From a viewpoint of the license admininstrator it’s hard to keep track of all licenses that a company has for VMware products.

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November 4th we published an article on Virtual Infrastructure best practices and the response was overwhelming. During the last month we received a lot of questions regarding best practices on VDI/VMware View. When I then read a comment from VMware’s evangelist, Richard Garsthagen, that the attention on blogs for VMware View was minimal I thought well let’s extend our View articles/knowledge base.

So, VMware View best practices. First of all check the article on Virtual Infrastructure best practices to create a good understanding for the underlying virtual infrastructure challenges.

So hereby my list of best practices which I gather from VMware KB articles, instructor led VMware View design training and the VMware community:

• CPU sizing;
• Memory sizing;
• Storage sizing;
• Network sizing.

If you have additions or new insights please reply.

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

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The last breakout session we attended the XTG vCenter Server Heartbeat workshop, a quick way to get familiar with a new VMware product.

The instructor first introduced us to the product and discussed some installation and configuration hints and tips.

After that we quickly started with preparing and cloning the vCenter Server and installing and configuring the vCenter Server Heartbeat product.

The workshop certainly was useful but in a different way you would probably expect.

After the workshop Anne Jan and I discussed our experiences with the product and we quickly agreed that VMware could have spent more time OEM-ing the former Neverfail product to give it a VMware-like interface instead of the 1980’s Windows 3.11 interface it has now. Besides that the configuration of the product has a very high tweaker-level. In our opinion this is a 0.9 version and in the 1.0 versionVMware should definitely address the interface and configuration look and feel.

Nevertheless VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat does what it is supposed to as we saw during the lab exercises where we did a clean failover and finally caused a BSOD which vCenter Server Heartbeat handled perfectly.

I wonder if customers are willing to pay so much money for a product which isn’t worthy the VMware name based on its ancient interface. I know I will be having a very hard time to convince customers to use this to achieve a very high vCenter protection level even when it’s clear that the use case is definitively there.

The VMware Fusion Team has been working around the clock to add new features, improve performance and fix over 50 bugs to give out a very nice product to the Apple loving colleagues.

The new automatic update feature for VMware Fusion helps to keep Fusion updated easily.

Improved 3D & Video Performance: Improved WDDM driver and 3D backend improvements speed up 3D applications from 20-80% on Mac OS X Snow Leopard. Video playback with Windows Media Player on Windows Vista and Windows 7 is greatly improved as well. Try it, you will love it!

Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala): Full support for Ubuntu 9.10 32-bit & 64-bit editions. Just like other Linux virtual machines, they support copy and paste, drag and drop and even Unity!

Even More 64-bit Support: Networking subsystem is now 64-bit native to match 64-bit core engine released initially with VMware Fusion 3 (vmware-vmx).

Easier Move to VMware Fusion: Import standalone VHD virtual disks and Parallels Desktop 5 virtual machines into VMware virtual machines.

Improved Resume Times: For those users who suspend their virtual machines, they reduced the time required to resume your virtual machines.

Check out the announcement post here

Joep Piscaer just finished his VMware Lab Manager 4 presentation at the Dutch VMUG and he he shared it at his website, VirtualLifestyle.nl.

Our blogging colleagues at Virtualistic.nl are busy recording it so it should be online soon on their video blog.

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At the fifth Dutch VMUG Event, I’ve given a presentation on VMware vCenter Lab Manager 4. I’ve uploaded the slidedeck of this (Dutch) presentation to SlideShare, a nifty way to share your presentations.

Our blogging colleagues at Virtualistic.nl keep a video blog on their site.

You can watch VMUG keynote and presentation ‘live’ from Nieuwegein (Netherlands) on their website.

Gerben Kloosterman put up a video of Eric Sloof while demoing Virtualization EcoShell at http://blog.virtualarchitect.nl

Pictures from Breakout session 2 by Bouke Groenescheij (Jume.nu) can be found here.

Breakouts in sessions 2:
- Virtualiseren van Exchange by Jan Willem Lammers – VMware
- How to monitor, manage & optimize a virtual environment by Danny Claproth – Vizioncore
- Project VRC by Ruben Spruijt – PQR/Jeroen van de Kamp – Login Consultants

Pictures from Breakout session 1 by Bouke Groenescheij (Jume.nu) can be found here.

Breakouts in sessions 1:
- VMware’s latest Virtual Desktop Infrastructure by Rory Clements – VMware
- Managing VMware vSphere 4 m.b.v. de Virtualization EcoShell by Eric Sloof – NTPro.nl
- Why the Virtual Data Center Starts with Compellent by Steven Dahlin – Compellent

For all the folks that didn’t hear about the EcoShell yet: The Virtualization EcoShell makes it possible to create scripts to automate management tasks for your virtual infrastructure, all from a user friendly user interface.

These scripts can be saved for later use.

This is not only good news for the lazy or time driven admin, but also from the point of making less mistakes. Actions can be run time after time at the same way.

The Virtualization EcoShell divides everything into the following actions:

• gather
• filter
• remediate
• report
• integrate

One of the items that is very interesting is vDiagram. vDiagram automagically creates a diagram of the items you want to report, for example which virtual machines are connected to what vSwitch.

Best Practice Filters are a great addition to the Virtualization EcoShell. For example: Give me all virtual machines with a connected CD-ROM drive that prevent VMotions. ESX hosts with NICs slower than 1GBit/s or VM’s with snapshots older than 7 days are part of the best practice filters.

Alan Renouf has put a lot of his PowerShell scripts he posted earlier on virtu-al.net in a PowerPack for the Virtualization EcoShell. vCheck is one of those things.

Eric has given a demo on his laptop. ESXi in a VMware Workstation 7 installation with a couple of virtual machines in it.

Without a line of programming or scripting he connects to the ESX host. Just by clicking he changes the connection of a couple of VMs to a different vSwitch.

If you want to change the code behind actions, no worry. Since everything is based on PowerShell commandlets you can change the code yourself.

Even creating your own PowerPack is very easy. As a demo Eric created a vmug PowerPack with a script he copied from the site from Alan. Sounds good, a vmug PowerPack.

Checkout  http://www.thevesi.org and ofcourse the site of Eric Sloof, ntpro.nl

Books that Eric mentioned in his presentation:

• vSphere Quick Start Guide
• Managing VMware Infrastructure with Windows PowerShell
• VMware VI and vSphere SDK

Twitter aliases to follow:

• carter shanklin @cshanklin
• alan renouf @alanrenouf
• hal rottenberg @halr9000
• luc dekens @LucD22
• Dmitry Sotnikov @DSotnikov
• hugo peeters @hugopeeters
• Arne Fokkema @afokkema
• Eric Sloof @esloof
• Scott Herold @vmguru

Scott Herold took the stage after Eric. He showed vRangerPro and the integration with the Virtualization EcoShell. From within the Virtualization EcoShell you are able to make charts from your backup times for example and use this in a monthly report.Even integration with vControl, a workflow application, is very easy from within the Virtualization EcoShell.

Scott is out in the exhibition hall to give more info and demo of the Virtualization EcoShell.

Keynote pictures by Bouke Groenescheij (Jume.nu) can be found here.

Today is the fifth Dutch VMUG event and the interest is overwhelming with 600 attendees.

VMGuru.nl attends for the first time this year, helping out with the event build up and attendee registration.

The first pictures can be found at the website of Bouke Groenescheij (Jume.nu).

9:30
The event is opened by Viktor van den Berg, followed by a video  message from VMware CTO, Steve Herrod.

9:45
Our third speaker is Richard Garsthagen, VMware’s Evangelist, talking about the road VMware has travelled in the last 11 years. As always Richard’s speeches are very enthusiastic and full of energy. He explains that VMware’s future is not all about virtual machines any more which is illustrated by their new logo where they stripped the three squares which represent virtual machines. VMware is becoming more and more about enabling companies to addept their IT to their business needs. So it’s not all about hypervisors and virtual infrastructure anymore it’s about enabling companies to becoming more flexible and thereby improving profit, quality and client satisfaction.

10:20
One way to do this is VMware’s implementation of the cloud and as Richard quotes Paul Maritz, ‘The cloud is not a destination but a way to do computing‘. At this moment it’s not possible yet to move a VM from your private cloud to a public cloud by a simple mouse click but it is already possible to run a VM in a service provider’s datacenter where you pay by use. But VMware is doing everything to make this possible in the future. One of the products VMware has released their first products to support this cloud idea namely vSphere 4 and CapacityIQ. The last products enables the pay by use model which is one of the prerequisites for the public cloud.

10:30
Richard finished with some nice tech news.

• VMware started with VMware Knowledge base TV
• Every Friday VMware NL launches an online webinar with every Friday new, different and interesting topics.
• VMworld Europe 2010 in Copenhagen will be much more oriented on networking.

Next up for me, the Scripting breakout session by Eric Sloof from NTPro.nl and Scot Herold from Vizioncore/VMGuru.com

Tomorrow is the big day for more than 600 VMware enthusiasts in the Netherlands with the start of the annual dutch VMUG event.

Anne Jan, Arjan  and I will be attending the VMUG event, you can follow us on VMGuru.nl or follow us using twitter.

If you’re not attending and want to follow the latest news you can also follow the #DutchVMUG tag or one of the attendees below. (Thnx to NTPro.nl)

More info on the Dutch VMUG can be found at www.vmug.nl (dutch).

Although PCoIP is very efficient display protocol also over WAN connection. (See video demonstration on Vimeo ) there was still the leak of a good WAN optimization solution for VMware View 4.0.

We all know that the user experience will heavily benefit  if we can control the WAN traffic. As we know the PCoIP uses both TCP and UDP transport protocols. All of the WAN optimization solutions support TCP. But UDP is not broadly supported with the WAN optimization solutions.

That changes because Expand Networks provide immediate support for all VMware View 4 remote display protocols across the Expand’s Accelerator range of WAN optimization solutions to securely enable, accelerate and control VMware View over the WAN, including the PCoIP protocol.

The benefits that Expand’s solution brings to VMware View include support for:

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A lot of our customers are asking me about the management differences between the VDI solutions from Citrix (XenDesktop 4.0) and VMware (View 4.0). Because I realize that there are a lot of “it depends” choices to be made I decided to compare the two solutions in a basic VDI setup. In a basic VDI environment you need a couple components.

I decided to compare the VMware View Premier edition with the Citrix XenDesktop Platinum edition. I know that the Citrix XenDektop Platinum edition brings a lot more products of Citrix within the bundle but because I am only comparing the basic components and no costs our nice to have features, that is not a problem.

So in a basic VDI environment you need:

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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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I have just updated the list after receiving word the new version is out and the build numbers are known for vSphere 4 and vCenter Server. So I compiled a list of build numbers and updates from the patch notes for VMware ESX and VMware vCenter Server.

vCenter Server 4.0 Update 1 | 19 Nov 2009 | Build 208156

vCenter Server 4.0 | 05 May 2009 | Build 162902

VirtualCenter 2.5 Server Update 5 | 10 Jul 2009 | Build 174791 (English version)

VirtualCenter 2.5 Server Update 4 | 23 Feb 2009 | Build 147633 (English version)

VirtualCenter 2.5 Server Update 3 | 03 Oct 2008 | Build 119598 (English version)

VirtualCenter 2.5 Server Update 2 | 25 July 2008 | Build 104217 (English version)

VirtualCenter 2.5 Server Update 1 | 10 Apr 2008 | Build 84767 (English version)

VirtualCenter 2.5 Server | 10 Dec 2007 | Build 64201

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