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.

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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.

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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.

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Today Scense launched version 7 of their User Workspace management. If you are going to do a full blown VDI install. A product like Scense will give the VDI implementation extra value to your users and easy management of the complete environment.

Scense 7 simplifies management and distribution of the end-user workspace within virtual and physical Windows desktop environments.

The main focus of this release is on the support of Windows 7 and 64 bits Microsoft Windows desktop environments. This release also introduces a new rich, modern and extremely intuitive user interface helping to further simplify user workspace management within MS Windows desktop environments.

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This week I got the question if I could draw up a short lists of pro’s and cons for MED-V. Since I’m doing virtualization in the widest possible way, this fits well in my job description.

But heck, what a question! Before I could even try to  answer the question I really had to dive into the Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization solution (hence MED-V) which is part of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP). Sure, I already seen some comments on the internet about MED-V and I already was somewhat biased. Still I tried to make it an objective report.

Let’s start with what it is not in my opinion. Although it enables management of virtualized desktops it is not a full blown desktop virtualization solution like XenDesktop and VMware View.

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Last week a colleague, who sells applications running on an Oracle Database, had some questions regarding Oracle and running it in a Virtual Machine (VM) on top of a VMware infrastructure with a customer.

1) How to license Oracle in a virtual environment?

I pointed him to an article about licensing the Oracle software in a virtual environment I wrote some time ago.

Oracle can namely be hard- and soft partitioned, where VMware, XenServer, Hyper V and Oracle VM are all marked as soft partitioning, while looking into the way Oracle VM can be hard partitioned I stumbled on the following how to do it:

There are two methods to pin virtual CPUs. You can use the xm command to pin a guests’s virtual CPUs or you can hardcode the CPU mapping in a guest’s vm.cfg file. The difference between pinning CPUs with xm and hard coding the CPU mapping in a guest’s vm.cfg file is the persistence of the CPU mapping. CPUs that are pinned with xm are not persistent between reboots. Hard coding the CPU mapping in a guest’s vm.cfg file is persistent between reboots. To comply with Oracle’s hard partitioning policy, you must hardcode the CPU mapping in a guest’s vm.cfg file.

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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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At the end of May of this year we wrote a article concerning Hypervisor comparisons and we got a lot of positive feedback on it. The downside to that is that people want an update as soon as one of the companies launches a new version of its product, and who can blame them. However the issue is that this takes a lot of research and because of that, a lot of time. And because two of us are ill and in bed wearing a sombrero and the other two are extremely busy, we simply don’t have that time right now.

However, Scott Lowe has written an excellent article on the feature comparison between VMware vSphere 4 and Microsoft’s Hyper-V R2 which is a must read for everybody who’s advising customers on hypervisors.

It’s not as extensive as the Enterprise hypervisor comparison we did earlier but it gives you a good image how both products relate to each other. To extend the picture I added a list of supported operating systems.

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This week a colleague called me with a VMware ESX problem. He’s doing a Exchange 2007 implementation and he configured a virtual machine which should function as the Mailbox server. He was complaining that the virtual machine took 13 to 15 minutes just to boot and he suspected a storage issue as they had been struggling with the storage for a few days.

I asked him to check the virtual machine performance tab and asked him if he saw anything strange. Nothing! The server had plenty of memory left and was not using very much CPU.

When I asked him how many resources he assigned to the virtual machine his response alerted me. He configured the virtual machine with 16GB of memory and 4 vCPUs!

When I asked him why he gave the virtual machine so much resources his response indicated that he hadn’t read the Virtual Infrastructure best practices and applied the ‘MS, I might use those resources just once during my lifecycle‘ sizing. When we checked the%CPU ready performance statistics the values were astronomical.

So I explained the behavior of the CPU scheduler to him and asked him to reduce the number of vCPUs to 1 or 2 and try again. When I called him the next day he told me that the virtual machine now booted within a minute.

So bottom line: Give a virtual machine the resources it needs for normal every day operation and be very modest. Monitor the virtual machine and adjust the resource settings according to your findings. In this case, less definitely is more and it’s very easy, especially in vSphere 4, to (hot) add resources. And if you do need 4vCPUs, it can be more effective to deploy two 2vCPU virtual machines instead of one 4 vCPU virtual machine.

Last Friday we had a session with Microsoft about ‘the Cloud’. We already heard a lot about clouds, but I must admit that both Microsoft presentations that day were refreshing.

Every cloud provider does his best to bring cloud thinking to the mind, but what exactly is ‘the Cloud’ ? There seems to be more than 76 different definitions for cloud computing.  While Googling for some background information I came across a quote from Larry Ellison (Oracle) which he did at Oracle OpenWorld:

The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can’t think of anything that isn’t cloud computing [..] The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?

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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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I was checking out the news and was checking out the competition on Microsoft’s Virtualization Team Blog and ran into some interesting news.

Microsoft just announced that their Windows Server 2008 R2 and Microsoft hyper-V Server 2008 R2 have been released to manufacturing.

I guess my ‘Microsoft-informant’ was right, Microsoft’s intention is to release Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V at the same time and not 3-6 months later as they did with version 1.0.

After the initial Hyper-V R1 release, Microsoft interviewed their customers to discover what they wanted in their new v2.0 product. These are the improvements and priorities which their customers want (according to Microsoft).

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As Microsoft Exchange server is one of my area’s of expertise (or so they keep telling me )  I have had numerous discussions in the past whether you should virtualize Exchange or not. For ages Microsoft has claimed it cannot be done, performance would suffer severely, you would not receive support in a virtual environment etcetera.

To be honest, I didn’t really care about it. We’ve designed perfectly working Exchange organizations on VMware when MS was still refusing support. There are some rules you need to respect when you design your messaging environment, but generally it is no problem if you have the required resources available!

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I use TWeetDeck on my laptop to follow the news concerning virtualization. vSphere, Hyper-V and Xen have their own column. It’s because of these queries I noticed a tweet from @ilijabrajkovic about a free Hyper-V training from Microsoft.

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Last night, after my son’s first birthday,  I checked my missed twitter messages and a retweet from Duncap Epping caught my eye. It was a link to an article from Eric Gray on vCritical about HA for Linux guests on Hyper-V. Now you will probably think, nice an HA for Linux on Hyper-V whitepaper/how-to, but this is not the case.

As you probably know, very little Linux distributions are supported on Hyper-V and therefore no integration tools are available. Because the lack of integration tools Microsoft Clustering Services, the service which provides HA services for Hyper-V, you can not gracefully shutdown an unsupported Linux host and when shutdown MSCS will desperately try to keep the guest up and running. Because of this shortcoming you will have to choose, run HA OR Linux because you can not run both.

A complete desciption can be found here in Eric Gray’s article on vCritical.com. If you are considering a Hyper-V implementation you should definitaly read this article.

Yesterday I attended the ‘TechNet – Get Ready for all Microsoft virtualization products’ session in Utrecht (NL). This was a new style paid (€99,-) Technet session, max of 20-30 professionals in a classroom. The program consisted of Hyper-V, App-V, Med-V, Terminal services and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008.

Hyper-V
We started with an introduction to Hyper-V, luckily the trainer had updated his lab to Hyper-V 2, so we could check out the new features which should compete with VMware. After explaining the architecture, networking and storage it was very obvious that this was the standard Microsoft propaganda. They were comparing Hyper-V 2 to VI 3.5, which were practically the same, but of course Microsoft’s hyper-V solution was much cheaper. Grrrrr! Again, when you do a comparison, do a fair comparison and compare Hyper-V to vSphere 4 (because the release is not far away I will allow Microsoft to use Hyper-V 2 in this comparison). Then the numbers are very different and maybe the VMware solution costs more but obviously you will get a lot more.

I also disliked the insinuation that when they compare a microkernel hypervisor to a monolithic hypervisor Microsoft  makes it look like VMware’s hypervisor is one out of the stone ages. Play fair, win the fight based on your own strong points.

When he explained the Hyper-V I/O architecture with the parent partition, VM Bus, synthetic drivers, etc, I asked him if this didn’t introduce a singe point of failure and a possible I/O bottleneck. In true MS fashion he denied both, claiming that I/O was tested and you shouldn’t install Exchange in the parent partition. Duh!

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Browsing through Planet V12n I stumbled upon a great article by Steve Kaplan, which I didn’t want to keep from you.

As we all know we’re in the midst of a hypervisor battle. VMware vs (Microsoft / Citrix).

VMware focuses on their broad range of products for server-, desktop- and application virtualization including the necessary management and automation tools and disaster recovery solutions to enable the virtualization of a complete data center and desktops.

Microsoft focuses on the cost perspective and claims that their Hyper-V solution is cheaper then VMware’s vSphere.

No problems so far but if you want to compare cost, keep the fight clean and do an honest comparison. In his article Steve points out the areas were he thinks the comparison is not fair or not clear. I’ve read the comparison multiple times and I must agree this is one of those cases where Microsoft does not play fair as we encountered earlier with Citrix’s misleading comparison of HA, 2.

In my opinion a great job by Steve and a must read article.

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

Last update: November 29th, 2011.

As you may have noticed, we at VMGuru.nl have been extremely busy the last few week. Tons of work accompanied with the right amount of stress, illness and personally the build of my new house. This certainly shows in the amount of article we posted lately.

But I try to keep up-to-date, certainly with the release of vSphere 4. So today I read a great article on vTeardown by E. Horschman which I did not want to keep from you.

The article describes the quick migration feature in Microsoft’s Hyper-V, compares this to the live migration feature in the new version and warns customers on the  ‘Quick’ features provided in the next version of Hyper-V.

In the past Microsoft claimed that their Quick Migration feature was enough and Live Migration, as VMware’s vMotion, was not needed.  In vTeardown’s article you can see how quickly Microsoft changes its opinion as soon as they have finally added the feature themselves.

‘Now that Microsoft has live migration on their Hyper-V roadmap, we’re starting to learn that they never really thought much of Quick Migration themselves.  I heard Mark Russinovich, one of their technical luminaries who gave a talk about Hyper-V R2 futures, actually come out and say what we all knew to be true, “Quick Migration was our first attempt to do a live migration, and to put a nice spin on it, we called it Quick Migration. [...] Even though we said, [...] ‘trust us this is really cool, this is what you want, you don’t want instant, that’s not as good as this, this is quick,  but people didn’t seem to buy that, so we ended up [...] implementing live migration, so that Quick Migration stuff is crap, this is really good.’”  Mark’s honesty got some laughs from the packed session, but it puts us on notice that we should be skeptical when Microsoft tags a feature as “Quick”.

Not very trustworthy in my opinion. E. Horschman agrees and adds a warning to beware of Microsoft’s ‘Quick’ features as they now use the same b*lls*!t motivation on their new Quick Storage Migration feature.

So check out ‘When Microsoft Says “Quick”, Do They Really Mean “Crap”?‘.

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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