For 10 years VMworld has been the source for the knowledge and connections you need to leverage virtualization and cloud computing technologies in your business. You can try out several new or improved solutions through the Hands-On-Labs (HOL) get deeper insights through great breakout sessions and of course meet several people including the VMGuru.nl crew for networking and to hang out with discussing the future of IT or just to chill.

This year’s theme is: Defy Convention if you translate that to dutch you get multiple options including surviving VMworld. The VMGuru.nl team is scheduled to be at VMworld San Francisco and VMworld Barcelona this year again, lets see if we survive!

If you want the latest news, scoops on products and solutions from the Solutions Exchange, technical deep dive information and many more keep tuned in to www.vmguru.nl

Snapshot Explorer completes Dell’s Free Utility Toolbox for Virtual Machine Administrators. Detect all snapshots, including orphaned snapshots, to avoid problems with performance and capacity with this 6^th utility which got added today! Foglight for Virtualization was formerly know under the name vOPS Server Explorer from vKernel. With the latest tool Snapshot explorer you can eliminate time consuming and tedious need to track snapshots manually.

The complete Foglight for Virtualization Free Edition toolbox contains up to a total of six very helpful utilities which are handy for any Virtualization Administrator around today.

The following tools are in the toolbox:

• Snapshot Explorer detects all snapshots, including orphaned snapshots, to avoid Problems with performance and capacity
• Environment Explorer provides at-a-glance information about performance, efficiency and capacity
• vScope Explorer offers immediate identification of VMs, hosts and data stores suffering performance, capacity and efficiency issues
• SearchMyVM Explorer delivers search capabilities, similar to Google, of the virtual environment
• Storage Explorer assesses storage performance and capacity across data stores and VMs
• Change Explorer lists all changes that occur in a virtual environment, and provides associated risk impact!

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Today Veeam announced 2 more secret features of their new and improved version of Veeam Backup & Replication, version v7.0.

The ‘Back-up from storage snapshots’ and ‘Build-in WAN Acceleration’ features now complete the list of 9 new features.

The new version now contains the following new features, check it out:

• Enhanced Backup & Recovery for vCloud Director;
  
• vSphere Web Client  integration;
• Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SharePoint;
• Virtual Lab for Hyper-V;
• Native Tape Support;
• Enhanced 1-Click Restore;
• Virtual Lab for Replicas (VMware Only);
• Back-up from storage snapshots;
• Build-in WAN acceleration.

Want to know more?   (more…)

At VMGuru.nl we’ve done a lot of articles on VDI performance and best practices. Recently I’ve done an article on ‘How to improve VMware View video performance‘ and Edwin did an article on ‘Boosting Google maps and video with VMware View‘.

Researching the possibilities and changes with Horizon View 5.2, Eric Sloof pointed me to two new technical white papers.

VMware recently released two white papers, one on the performance and best practices for the new VMware Horizon View 5.2 and the second on the use of hardware accelerated 3D graphics with VMware Horizon View 5.2.

This is must read material for everyone who’s designing, planning and installing a VMware Horizon View 5.2 VDI environment.

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Every time a vendor releases a new hypervisor, it’s always more reliable and stable than all the previous versions and certainly better than the competition. But was the previous version all that bad?

Of course with the addition of more and more advanced features it becomes more and more difficult to create a reliable and stable product simply because of the immense amount of code and the interdependency between all the different components. VMware has always had a dedicated hypervisor and with the release of ESXi they further reduced the code base of vSphere ESXi to minimize the attack surface. This also reduces the amount of code to patch which further improves reliability, stability and security.

Last week I visited a customer who, much to my surprise, still ran some VMware ESX 2.5 servers. According to the customer the servers ran fine and they had never had any problems.

When we opened the console, we found out that these ancient ESX 2.5 servers have had an amazing availability during the last 4 years.

Check this out!

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As I said earlier this week, VMware memory management is still a topic which a lot of VMware administrators don’t understand.

Tuesday I discussed the virtual machine memory allocation graphs. Today we will deal with  VMware vSphere uses transparent page sharing (TPS), memory compression, host swapping and ballooning.

VMware ESXi, a crucial component of VMware vSphere 5.0, is a hypervisor designed to efficiently manage hardware resources including CPU, memory, storage, and network among multiple, concurrent virtual machines. In this article I will  describes the basic memory management concepts in VMware ESXi and describe the performance impact of these options.

ESXi uses several innovative techniques to reclaim virtual machine memory, which are:

• Transparent page sharing (TPS)—reclaims memory by removing redundant pages with identical content;
• Ballooning—reclaims memory by artificially increasing the memory pressure inside the guest;
• Hypervisor swapping—reclaims memory by having ESXi directly swap out the virtual machine’s memory;
• Memory compression—reclaims memory by compressing the pages that need to be swapped out.

So how does it work.

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VMware memory management is still a topic which a lot of VMware administrators don’t understand. I often come across people who have no idea when VMware vSphere uses transparent page sharing (TPS), memory compression, host swapping or ballooning. They even mention disabling or removing the ballooning driver without knowing why.  I also meet a lot of VMware administrators having trouble explaining the virtual machine memory allocation graphs.

Let’s start with the last one.

We all know the nice graphs with all different colors, 9 different memory classifications and reservations and limits.

This screen shows the following values:

Host memory

• Consumed memory;
• Overhead consumption;

Guest memory

• Private memory;
• Shared memory;
• Swapped memory;
• Compressed memory;
• Ballooned memory;
• Unaccessed memory;
• Active memory.

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In 2008 I wrote an article named “Hyper-V, not in my datacenter!” which was based on Hyper-V version 1. In 2009 I wrote an article named “Hyper-V, the laughter continues” and “ESX vs Hyper-V mythbusting myth” which was based on Hyper-V version 2.

Microsoft promised/warned us that with Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V version 3 this would all be history. But as Sander wrote in a more recent article named “Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V: overpromising and underdelivering” this turned out to be a marketing statement based on a premature product with no suitable management tools.

But now with the release of System Center 2012 Service Pack 1, Hyper -V version 3 should be the VMware vSphere-killer (according to MS).

Too bad, the sequel continues! Yesterday Edwin pointed me to a great article by Justin Paul, a fellow blogger, vExpert, VCP and EMC specialist, in which he describes his recent struggles with Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V.
True, in the last four point Justin refers to some information which is a bit outdated, but he has a valid point stating “Then explain why it happened to a 2012 hyperV cluster if it is fixed ?” when people in the comment section claim that Microsoft solved this in the new version of Hyper-V. Apparently they weren’t fixed.

When I read Justin’s comments on the CSV issues and the hassle to setup a Hyper-V environment, I stand by my earlier position, this is not a product which I trust to base my enterprise IT infrastructure on. So still, “Hyper-V? Not in my datacenter…”.

Check out Justin’s article on “Justin’s IT Blog”.

Yesterday I was busy trying some things in my VMware Horizon View 5.2 environment and after a while I got tired of repeating the same tasks on different desktop pools over and over again. Looking for a way to make things easier I came across the View Pool Manager which is a VMware Fling that allows VMware Horizon View administrators to easily manage multiple desktop pools at the same time.

With this tool VMware solves one of the biggest challenges a VMware View administrators faces in large deployments is desktop pool maintenance. Commonly each desktop pool has an Active Directory security group entitlement with the number of users a given desktop pool will support. As employees leave/join the organization, security groups require maintenance to ensure the number of users in each group correctly match the amount of desktops available. VMware View Pool Manager allows VMware View administrators to easily manage users across desktop pools and security groups for large deployments.

This tool allow administrators to bind an Active Directory connection and specify:

• How many users there should exist per group (based on VMware View pool size);
• Floating or Persistent deployment;
• Source Security Groups (all users to be distributed to pools);
• Destination Security Groups (All groups the users may be assigned to).

The View Pool Manager requires .NET Framework 4.0. The .NET 3.5 SP1 installation might require Internet connectivity to download more files. Verify that you are a member of the Administrators group on on the domain.

I tried this tool in my test environment and it’s a great help. It really saved me a lot of time in a small environment, so in a large VMware Horizon View deployment this tool should help the View administrators to save hours of work adding, removing and maintaining users, desktop pools and security groups.

The View Pool Manager is a development from Andre Leibovici (myvirtualcloud.net).

I really like it, so when you have a View environment and need a lot of time maintaining it, give it a try!

Download View Pool Manager.

Serial Port

While pursuing the 100% virtual mark you once in a while run into trouble with legacy hardware where there is hardware directly attached to the physical server you are going to virtualize. If it is USB equipment you can use USB Anywhere devices to make it happen, but if it is serial port connected equipment it gets harder to tackle that issue.

For instance you want to virtualize a building management system server with reading equipment connected to the serial ports. Is that possible? Yes you can!

It is possible to use a Virtual Serial Port Concentrator, as for instance the Avocent ACS V6000, which is described in this KB article and as mentioned in the vSphere 5 documentation here.

By connecting physical serial ports over the network with a virtual machine you can break the dependency of the physical layer and the OS layer. By solving this puzzle you can protect the organization against legacy hardware failure  and/or from software that nobody knows how it is installed anymore.

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Shortly after the release of vCenter 5.1, VMware released “vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager 1.0″. With this product you as an administrator are able to manage third party hypervisors like Microsoft’s Hyper-V from within your vCenter installment.

This will give companies more flexibility over what hypervisors they are able to use and thus use the hypervisor they need for each specific situation.

Multi-Hypervisor manager can be installed on the server which also contains the vCenter installation or can be on a separate server. The installation process is pretty straightforward (depending on your installation and security profile, you may have to open up some extra ports). After the installation on the server you will only need to download and install the plugin for the vSphere client (installing the plugin). After the plugin is installed you can open a separate inventory from the vSphere client homepage that will show you all 3th party hosts and their virtual machines.

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During a performance optimizing session this week, with a customer, we found some interesting things to boost specific parts of the environment. While playing a high resolution video with clipping where the whole screen turns black and shows a new screen a split second later.

When we started, we saw the video bump and freeze from time to time. Also we experienced ghost lines on the middle of the screen, where the upper part of the screen moved first while the bottom part tried to keep up. We used the Fast & Furious 6 Official Trailer in an 1080p format for testing. The the business news running in an embedded Windows media player on Internet Explorer 9 didn’t perform well either.

The vDesktop is a Windows 7 Enterprise desktop with 2GB memory and 2 vCPU so it can play native 720p videos when necessary as Erik mentioned in his post. We are running the VMware View environment on an Imtech built Flexpod with NetApp storage, Cisco UCS computing power and Cisco Nexus switching for VMware vSphere and VMware View 5.

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Last week I was able to attend a presentation from Whiptail in which they talked about their flash-based storage array. With their product portfolio they offer storage solutions that deliver high levels of speed for applications which produce high loads on storage.

Whiptail positions itself in the marked as a storage solution for applications like VDI, server virtualization and databases that demand high performance. At this moment they are not trying to compete with storage vendors that deliver high amounts of storage space. high numbers on read and write actions, high bandwidth and low latency times are the current key values of the Whiptail storage solutions.

The Whiptail storage family consists of the:

The Accela which is smallest model in the family. This unit uses 2U of rack space and has a power usage below 200 watts. It can deliver a storage capacity from 1,5 TB up to 12 TB at a write speed of 250k IOPS (based on 4K cryptographically random writes) a bandwidth of 1.9 GB/s and a latency value of 100 µs (0,1 ms).

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Last month we asked to vote for us if you appreciated our blog and apparently a lot of you did.

This year almost 1.300 votes were recorded compared to 1.200 last year, also the total number of blogs on the list increased from 187 to 243 blogs to choose from. There were over 80 new blogs on the ballot and 4 new blogs made it into the top 25. The enormous number of VMware blogs makes it so much tougher to get in the top 25.

So unfortunately we dropped from the 19th to the 31st spot on the list.

Besides that there are tons of bloggers from VMware or VMware/virtualization-related companies which create excellent content, so that a top 25 spot for an independent blogger seems impossible. Luckily Eric created a separate category for that and guess what?

You voted us as 4th Favorite Independant VMware blog! THANK YOU!

As independent bloggers we are very proud and honored that VMGuru.nl finished #4 in this competitive environment. Thanks to Eric Siebert’s for organizing this yearly blogger contest on vSphere-land.com. 

We appreciate your votes and ongoing support and want to thank all who voted for us!!!

So you want to attend TechEd 2013?

In March, Veeam is giving away a free pass to TechEd 2013. All you have to do is register.

The winner will be selected on March 18, so you have two weeks left to win!

Last year VMGuru.nl dropped for the 13th to the 19th spot in the top VMware/virtualization blogs 2012. Now, it is time again to vote the top VMware/virtualization blogs for 2013.

Please help us to reclaim the 13th position or even leap into the top 10!

So if you like our blog please vote VMGuru.nl #1.

As in last years poll you can vote in special categories to help distinguish certain types of blogs. The categories are independent of the general voting so first pick and rank your top 10 overall favorite blogs and then choose your favorite blog in each category.

VMGuru.nl also participates in the Top Independent blog for 2013!

For years VMware has been busy creating a range of Horizon-like products. At VMworld 2009 there was already a preview of what the folks in Palo Alto were working on.
Since then a lot has changed, AppBlast was shown, Octopus came (and went again).

30 minutes ago VMware finally launched their new range of end user computing products called the VMware Horizon Suite.

So, what does Horizon consist of? Well, actually Horizon is the new name for the collection of ALL End User Computing (EUC) products VMware has to offer, some of which you already know and love, like VMware View and ThinApp. But now the new cool products are finally here!

So, what is VMware Horizon Suite? It consists of these products:

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Today, VMware announced the acquisition of Virsto Software, a company which creates storage optimization software for virtual environments.

Any administrator will tell you that managing performance and data services for virtual machines can be challenging, especially in I/O-intensive environments like virtual desktops. With Virsto storage optimization software you can accelerate I/O performance for any block-based storage system and deliver data efficiency services like snapshots and clones. With these technologies it is possible to improve the performance and utilization of storage systems.

Paired with VMware vSphere, the Virsto storage hypervisor is a simple plug-in that addresses the storage problems associated with server and desktop virtualization. With Virsto enterprises can:

• Reduce VM disk footprint by 90%
• Unclog I/O bottlenecks and triple VM density
• Increase VM performance up to 10x
• Eliminate 99% of the time spent provisioning VM storage

VMware will continue to offer Virsto’s standalone virtual appliance to help accelerate storage performance and improve efficiency in VMware vSphere environments. But their main use for Virsto is to include the Virsto technology into the VMware products and improve their software defined storage solutions and therefor improving their overall software defined datacenter solution.

More information regarding the acquisition can be found here.