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

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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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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I do like advertising from time to time. I think advertising gives away a lot about how companies operate and what their internal values are. You also find out if the company understands their market and their potential users.

When looking for VMware View articles with Google I came across an ad for Citrix, look at the picture to the right. The ad is somewhat funny actually. Citrix says that their solution with HDX is faster than VMware View. Perhaps it is, perhaps it isn’t, I don’t know. It all depends on workloads, hypervisor, storage and so on.

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Last week I held a presentation for our Sales department. As we sold a lot of Citrix Xantippe over the last few years they wanted me to tell them more about the differences between a VMware View and the traditional terminal server based Citrix XenApp solution. So I made a summery about the differences and similarities. When VMware also asked me about the presentation I decided to translate it into English and share it with you all.

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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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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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Yesterday Citrix announced HDX 3D which is an enhancement to the ICA protocol which, according to Citrix, delivers 3D applications by only using one-tenth of the bandwidth.

This is fierce competition for VMware’s PCoIP which they developed with Teradici and which VMware will demo at VMworld 2009 this week.

I have only seen the HDX 3D demo video, which can be found here, and I’m anxiously waiting for footage of the PCoIP demo at VMworld 2009 this week. I’ve seen the demo at VMworld Europe 2009 and I must say I was very impressed . On the other hand I found the Citrix videos to be very shaky/flashy/blinky. I hope (and to be honest, I think) that this is not representative of real life performance (I’m in a pro Citrix mood today ).

If you want to know what HDX 3D is and how it works please visit BrianMadden.com. He can explain this much better than I can but you will have to see past the Citrix minded VMware skepticism ‘If VMware can actually come out with a decent implementation of PC-over-IP’-like comments.

Burton Group is in their last day of their annual Catalyst Conference in San Diego (July 27 – 31, 2009). Wednesday they had their announced VMware vs Citrix battle and I just watched their video feed.

It was a very interesting ‘battle’ between VMware’s Scott Drummonds and Citrix’s Simon Crosby but I must admit that I was a bit annoyed a times. I think the the photo on the left captures the atmosphere for the debate quite well.

Simon Crosby constantly attacking VMware on various issues, but mainly on VMware’s standpoint on performance testing, and Scott Drummonds staying very relaxed, not getting into a bitch fight, throwing mud and pulling hair.

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A few days ago Edwin and me had some employees from RES software visiting us, giving us a demo of the RES Powerfuse and RES Wisdom products. While both these products introduce interresting features, RES Powerfuse is the one I would like to eleberate on since this product has potential within the virtualisation world.

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As I am in the final week before my holiday and all projects are finished, I thought it might be a good idea to check out the competition. So I downloaded the free version of Citrix’s XenServer 5.5 to see what the fuss is all about.

First I tried to install it on a spare desktop at home (P4 2,4GHz CPU, 2GB RAM) but this failed, probably because the CPU doesn’t supply Intel VT.

Yesterday at work I grabbed two desktops with a Core2Duo E6400 with Intel VT and 4GB of RAM and installed Citrix XenServer 5.5 on it.

The installation is pretty straightforward, much like ESXi, and in about 5-10 minutes you will have a XenServer up and running. The first thing I noticed is that the console is very feature rich. We all know the yellow/gray console of an ESXi server and all you can do is basic configuration tasks like set an IP address, DNS server and default gateway, give the server its name, do a few tests and that’s about it. The console of a XenServer has a lot more features. Next to all ESXi-like features you can start and stop virtual machines, configure storage, resource pools and licensing, configure back-up, restore and updates.

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April 25th we published our Enterprise Hypervisor comparison and we got very positive comments on it. A few people were kind enough to provide us feedback so we could improve the document, thanks for that.

I collected all comments and feedback and created version 1.3 of our Enterprise Hypervisor comparison which can be found here.

Again, feel free to contact us when you have feedback for us so we can improve the list.

(Gabrie, thanks for the detailed feedback. I hope  you will find that all points are taken care of.)

Update 4-6-09: Updated to version 1.3 after feedback from Jorge

The last few weeks many blogs and forums have spend time on hypervisor comparisons and I have read tons of articles on the subject. Many only compare hypervisors based on performance, features or cost. I think it’s a bit more complicated then that. After Citrix announced that their XenServer product is available for free I spend a fair deal of my time explaining to colleagues and clients that this is a hoax and that cost is not the only reason to base their decision on. Especially in the case of XenServer the choice and the long term effects make it a little bit more complicated.

When I read Chris Wolfe’s article on ‘Production-class Hypervisor Evaluation criteria‘ and saw his VMworld Europe 2009 presentation (DC15) I found someone who read my mind. Chris knows what he is talking about and uses the right criteria to select the right hypervisor for the job. Now you probably think ‘These VMGuru.nl guys are VMware fans so here we go again‘ but the opposite is true.

Like Chris I think every situation has its own ideal solution and you should select the hypervisor based on well-considered selection criteria and because my employer, Centric, focuses on clients with 500+ workstations/employees these criteria are Enterprise-class hypervisor selection criteria.

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Now most of our loyal followers know, I usually do not post any content on this blog other than things related to the hosting of website. It’s my “job” to keep this part of the infrastructure running (well, that’s not quite how it is, but that’s another subject for another post ). In my day-to-day job I see a lot of infrastructures pass by and recently I started to notice that some of my colleagues look at virtualisation as an application. They think in boxes.. “we need a DC, and a filer, and blahblahblah”…So I thought, let’s post an entry here and see if you all have something to say about it.

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XenServer Enterprise for free?

Anne Jan and I were asked last week ,while doing work at our companies  Headquarters, how we thought about Citrix giving away XenServer Enterprise for free and positions it as “XenServer a complete free Enterprise Virtual Infrastructure solution”. So I asked them what is considered “free” and what are the needs of the customer with a complete data center/enterprise virtual infrastructure?

The question arose because they wanted to know if they made the right choice for a very big company to choose VMware Infrastructure 3.5 Enterprise above  Citrix XenServer.

So looking at what customers answer me when I ask what their requirements are, are for me the best route to go, because customers are the only one who know their organization’s virtualization requirements.

Most given answers I get when I ask for the requirements are:

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