The new version of OpenStack, which will be released in Q2 of 2012, does not support Microsoft Hyper-V anymore. The developers have had enough with the buggy code.
One of the developers of OpenStack has written a patch with which the Hyper-V code and support will be removed from the cloud platform. The patch has already been approved and constitutes a part ofthe next version of OpenStack, codename Essex, which is expected to be released in Q2.
At the end of 2010 Microsoft announced that they would deliver code which would enable the use of Hyper-V in a cloud solution based on the open-source cloud platform, OpenStack. Microsoft never finished and maintained this, causing the code to be full of errors. After people in the OpenStack-forum suggested to remove the Hyper-V code, Microsoft quickly released a statement saying “Microsoft is committed to working with the community to resolve the current issues with Hyper-V and OpenStack“. However, the OpenStack developers decided not to wait until Microsoft finally fixed their code and decided to remove Hyper-V support with the new release.
OpenStack, Founded by Rackspace Hosting and NASA, is a global collaboration of developers and cloud computing technologists producing the ubiquitous open source cloud computing platform for public and private clouds. The project aims to deliver solutions for all types of clouds by being simple to implement, massively scalable, and feature rich. The technology consists of a series of interrelated projects delivering various components for a cloud infrastructure solution.
This week Veeam released their latest version of their Backup & Replication software “Veeam Backup & Replication v6“. With their latest release they offer enhanced scalability and performance.
They also add support for Microsoft Hyper-V so you can protect your multi-hypervisor environment with only one product, from a single console.
New features in version 6 are:
A new distributed architecture for better scalability. Deployment and Maintenance for remote office and large installations are simplified;
Advanced replication by combining both backup and replication in to one solution;
Multi-hypervisor support with the new support for Microsoft Hyper-V. The console let’s you manage both VMware and Hyper-V hosts from a single console;
1-Click file restore is an enhancement on the existing “Instant File-Level Recovery” reducing the number of steps needed from 10 to 1.
During the last few years we published several Enterprise Hypervisor comparisons and we got very positive comments and feedback on it. With the release of vSphere 5, XenServer 6 and a service pack for Hyper-V it was time for an update.
It very interesting to see how some of the products have improved over the years and how the three major manufacturers look at each other and copy features. But you can’t trust all manufacturers by just a simple green checkbox. Some claimed features need third party add-ons, aren’t suitable for production workloads or are only supported on a limited set of operating systems. You have to investigate further and I hope I’ve done most of that work for you with this new enterprise hypervisor comparison.
I often get questions about how to license Microsoft Windows 7 in a VMware View VDI deployment, I will try to elaborate what is needed in general and for specific scenarios. By understanding how they apply to common VMware View scenarios you can calculate and try to get the most out of existing and new licenses needed.
Every device you want to use to access the VMware View environment, with Windows 7 Desktops, needs to be licensed. It does not matter if it is a PC, a Thin or Zero client, an iPad or similar devices, every device accessing Windows 7 via VDI needs to be licensed.
You have two ways to license the environment, you can utilize the Software Assurance Windows Virtual Desktop Access Use Rights benefit at no additional cost; or you purchase Windows VDA subscription. Windows VDA is licensed per access device. There is currently no option to license Windows VDA per user.
VDA through SA or VDA subscription?
Certain devices, such as thin or zero clients, do not qualify for Software Assurance coverage for Windows. To license these devices for use with VDI you will need Windows VDA subscription. The rule of thumb is that if it isn’t a full blown Windows Desktop Operating System with Software Assurance (SA) you will need VDA subscription licenses to access the VMware View vDesktops.
VMware’s response then was very simple and straight forward. Exchange CCR clustering on VMware is not supported on iSCSI!
When asked if VMware had plans to change this support issue in the future the response was promising.
“The Exchange team within VMware requested the vSphere product team to support iSCSI for CCR and DAG clusters. They also would like to remove the RDM requirement for CCR and DAG.
Response from the product team is that they are testing and will update the support stance in a future release.”
Well, the future is now. I stumbled upon a VMware KB article, released May 5, which provides clear guidelines on the vSphere support status when running various Microsoft clustering solutions on VMware vSphere 4.
Of course we all knew that already Paul Venezia posted an in depth article on Infoworld where he compares the four main server virtualization software competitors on a selection of criteria.
Now, you can nit-pick on the measurements he made or the criteria he has chosen, but in general I think it’s a solid test of up-to-date versions.
The best conclusions I can draw from his report are these:
VMware might not always be the cheapest, VMware might not always be the one with the highest speeds.. but VMware is still the one with the most diverse OS support (any x86 OS can be virtualized), the best management toolkit and the most reliable architecture.
Some time ago.. actually, a long time ago, we here at VMGuru.nl received a sample of a training DVD from TrainSignal. I promised to write a review on it, but I honestly didn’t come around to it due to all sorts of personal stuff. But the DVD box made it safely through the move from one house to the next. So, today I sat down and opened the DVD box.
So, first of all, it’s definitely a proper training. This isn’t your average ‘we demo, you watch’ kind of training. It’s aimed to let you pass the Exchange 2010 exam, but it does more. This 3 DVD box set covers all topics you need to understand to successfully implement Exchange 2010 into an organization in 40 lessons. It does not only show you how and where to configure things, but most importantly, it tries to show you why. This is the first time I’ve encountered such an approach in a self-paced training package. It really is pretty extensive.
After installing the patches described in Microsoft Knowledge Base articles 2482017 or 2467023 Windows 7 clients are unable to connect from the View Client to the View Connection Server.
According to a VMware Knowledge Base article there is a conflict with two security bulletins issued for Windows 7, causing disruptions for VMware’s View Client and creating connection failures for users attempting to access the View Client Server.
One of my coworkers pointed me to a video from this years Tech-Ed Europe about VDI protocols. Bernhard Tritsch did an interesting comparison between the different remote protocols used in today’s VDI solutions. In a 60 minute session Bernhard explains the differences between location (host vs client), type (hardware vs software) rendering and compression types (lossless vs lossy).
Although the results aren’t that good for PCoIP (software version) it still is a very interesting video.
I’ve written about Zimbra before. Actually, we here at vmguru.nl use Zimbra for all our email and collaboration. So, today we were invited to join the Zimbra Breakfast Meeting at the Scandic Hotel in Copenhagen.
Zimbra, for the ones who don’t know what it does, is a collaboration suite. It’s the open source exchange alternative. Well, it’s getting more than an alternative. It’s getting competitive in a rapid pace. According to Zimbra, it’s the next-generation Exchange.
There are a lot of products and product features available for creating a (more or less) high available environment. If you look at Microsoft SQL Server you have the option to create a Microsoft Cluster, you can use Marathon everRun, VMware Fault Tolerance if you have a 1 vCPU SQL server, etc.
When I was researching the possibility to create a redundant Microsoft SQL Server environment without the use of shared storage I noticed that a lot of the options needed shared storage: clustering, FT, etc. Some products, like everRun, can be used without shared storage, but are very costly.
An alternative to the options above is Database Mirroring (DBM), which is a part of Microsoft SQL Server. Database Mirroring (DBM) is in essence the possibility to replicate/mirror all database content to a second database server. With DBM you can achieve high availability for your databases without the hassle of Microsoft Clustering Services (MSCS) and without the need for shared storage.
Some weeks ago I posted an article about some bad network performance when moving VMs to a new ESX host.
Last week I got an e-mail which announced some updates and among it was the one promised to us by the engineer that helped us with our problem.
Description of the patch is exactly what we where experiencing with our VMs:
“When you access remotely using Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) from a client machine to a Microsoft Windows virtual machine with TCP segmentation offload (TSO) enabled and EnablePMTUDiscovery parameter set to 0, the network connection is slow and sometimes, the connection might not work. This issue is reported on Broadcom bnx2x NICs, such as BCM57710, BCM57711, BCM57711E, etc.” http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1026129
After installing the patch on one of the ESX hosts we tested with a test VM on a patched and an unpatched ESX host and there was a clear difference in performance. The logon on the VM was much faster on the ESX host with the patch.
For us the patch fixed the problem and we are now deploying it on all the ESX hosts.
Some of you might know me as a dedicated MS Exchange junkie. Ever since Microsoft launched version 5.0 of Exchange, I’ve been working with it and I must admit I never found a collaboration suite quite like it. I’ve had numerous discussions with Lotus Notes or Novell Groupwise folks but they never conviced me (believe me, I tried all suites hands-on). And yes, I am aware of all the problems Exchange had in the past, including being a spamrelaying nuisance, a memory hog, a disk killer and so on (most errors were caused by faulty configurations, btw).
About 8 years ago some folks in, I think it was Germany, started a project with opensource software to create an Exchange equivalent with nothing but opensource software. Actually, it is pretty logical. If you strip down everything around Exchange, you are left with a (pretty ancient) database system (Jet), a webserver (IIS) and an SMTP engine. So, why can this not be done with MySQL, Apache and Sendmail or Postfix? It should be possible.
We talked about licensing Windows Server on a VMware environment but that’s only one part of the licensing nightmare. You will also need client access licenses also called CALs.
Client Access Licensing
In addition of the Windows Server 2008 License you also need a Windows Server 2008 Client Access License also called CAL. This is required for each user or device (or combination of both) that accesses or uses the Windows 2008 software.
Requirements
Every user or device accessing the Windows Server 2008 needs a CAL. You don’t need a CAL when:
You access the instance of server software only through the internet without being authenticated or individually identified by the server software;
You access Windows Web Server 2008;
If external users are accessing the instances of server software and you have acquired a Windows Server 2008 External Connector License for each server being accessed;
You only administer the server software with two devices or users;
You use the Windows Server 2008 solely as a virtualization host.
The last point doesn’t impact us much because we use VMware ESXi solely as our virtualization platform.
Since Microsoft introduced Windows 2008 back in 2007, there is the opportunity to install a Core Server. It was the first time Microsoft introduced a lean-and-mean server, where a lot of the Linux and Unix admins always complained that the GUI on a server eats so many resources where nobody ever really uses it.
Core server installations have a big advantage above the full installation of windows: it uses up less resources on your (virtual) infrastructure. (more…)
A few weeks ago I got an assignment to review a colleague’s infrastructure design based on VMware.
The design was fine (because they used my design document as template ) but one thing triggered me.
There was a special port group on one of the virtual switches names ‘MSCLUSTER’. No problem so far but I heard the client recently migrated to iSCSI storage.
The combination Microsoft Clustering Services (MSCS) combined with iSCSI triggered my alarm bells. As I recalled Microsoft Clustering on iSCSI is not a problem but Microsoft Clustering on VMware with iSCSI is not supported (by VMware).
So, I rejected the design based on this support issue.
This message was not well received, as it turned out they had just migrated their clustered Exchange servers and had been running this way for a while now. Proposing to the client to migrate again was no option. So they tried to question my findings. They had been running this setup without any problems and Exchange CCR clustering wasn’t real Microsoft Clustering because no disks were clustered, only the Exchange services.
Last year we published an Enterprise Hypervisor comparison and we got very positive comments and feedback on it.
During the last few weeks I received many update requests so I decided to update the old hypervisor comparison but this time I changed the setup a bit.
Changes:
No beta or pre-release versions are used. In the last document we also compared Hyper-V R2 beta which wasn’t officially released.
This time all software is available and no features are subject to change due to beta-test, etc.;
The versions used are the platinum/ultimate/fully-featured versions of the hypervisors. Product features can be limited by lower license versions;
No free versions have been used in this comparison.
At a client site we came upon a problem with Windows 2003 VM’s. They would get low network performance when we moved them to a newly formed ESX cluster consisting of HP 460c G6 blades. In some cases logging on to the server with a remote session took about 20 minutes.
As I mentioned this only occurred when we moved a VM to the new cluster, but also VM’s that where newly installed would get the same problem when running on the new cluster. As we are using Altiris to install and configure new VM’s a colleague decided to install a new VM by going through the steps manually which normally would be done by Altiris and found out that after the activation of a security template the performance dropped significantly.
Last week I had another nice discussion around the 90 day assignment rule for Windows Server licensing on a VMware environment. To answer this shortly: You may move running instances between licensed servers without acquiring additional licenses. However you cannot exceed the maximum number of instances each server is licensed to run.
Microsoft Operating System Environments (OSE)
Microsoft defines Operating System Environments for allocating licenses. This is a nice and flexible way to accommodate customer demand. To understand how licensing works under virtualization, it is important to understand how Microsoft defines an OSE.
An “operating system environment” is:
1 all or part of an operating system instance, or all or part of a virtual (or otherwise emulated) operating system instance which enables separate machine identity (primary computer name or similar unique identifier) or separate administrative rights, and
2 instances of applications, if any, configured to run on the operating system instance or parts identified above.
After attending the dutch Citrix Partner Exchange 2010 I realized that there is a lot of FUD out there:
in the Citrix community with regards to VMware View and PCoIP;
with me personally with regards to XenDesktop (no F, but a lot of UD)
This is also what we saw when Alex shared his experience with Citrix XenDesktop, which was not so positive, and we got a lot of comments comparing XenDesktop to VMware View.
But the Citrix Partner Exchange got me interested in XenDesktop and XenClient and I decided to do a little research. Then I came across Brian Maddens site to find that he had just finished his ‘Geek week VDI‘ in which he did a ‘real life’ lab-test with VMware, Citrix and Microsoft VDI. They tested all three vendor in their lab environment but added a WAN ‘simulator’ to create real life and worst case scenarios by introducing packet loss and latency.
And honestly I was surprised by some of their their conclusions. Not because I have no faith in Brian Madden but because I know Brian Madden to be a real Citrix enthusiast and a PCoIP critic. At the end he was very honest by admitting that Citrix XenDesktop looks like a mash-up of a bunch of different things, he was surprised by the simple, straightforward installation and configuration of VMware View and the good performance of PC-o-IP.
So bottom line?
VMware View shines because of simplicity and has good user experience even with PC-o-IP over a WAN connection.
XenDesktop is, at the moment, certainly the more mature and complete product but it’s complexity is a drawback.
And Microsoft ‘in box’ VDI? Well as expected, it’s complex, not enterprise ready and it’s no match for Citrix or VMware.
So as always, there is no clear winner, it all depends on the customer’s wishes.
Special thanks to Brian Madden and his team for creating this great VDI test!
I won’t summarize the total VDI test, you can read it yourself here but I will quote some of the conclusions which I found to be very interesting.
The new version of OpenStack, which will be released in Q2 of 2012, does not support Microsoft Hyper-V anymore. The developers have had enough with the buggy code.
This week Veeam released their latest version of their Backup & Replication software “Veeam Backup & Replication v6“. With their latest release they offer enhanced scalability and performance.
During the last few years we published several Enterprise Hypervisor comparisons and we got very positive comments and feedback on it. With the release of vSphere 5, XenServer 6 and a service pack for Hyper-V it was time for an update.
August 2010 I wrote an article on
I’ve written
