Recently Starwind contacted us and asked if we would be interested in doing a review on their iSCSI SAN software solution. The enthusiasts that we are, we quickly replied that we would take the challenge. After some e-mails back and forth and setting up a small test lab we where ready to go.

So what is the Starwind iSCSI SAN solution? The solution enables you to change a Windows server into a iSCSI SAN. With this solution Starwind is mainly aiming for SMB organizations. As far that I could see the Starwind solution offers the same (basic) functionality as you would expect from the hardware counterparts.

Some of the key features mentioned by Starwind are:

• Synchronous Data Replication: Real-time data replication across a 2 node storage cluster.
• High Availability / Automatic Failover: Fault tolerant active-active technology eliminates a single point of failure.
• Remote Replication across a WAN: replicates data to a remote location allowing multi-site disaster recovery in the event of a disaster at the primary site.
• CDP & Snapshots: captures instant, point-in-time volume images, allowing a user to rollback and recover an entire volume or individual files and folders.
• High Speed Caching: accelerates storage I/O by using the server’s memory.
• Server clustering: supports Windows Server 2008, Hyper-V, VMware ESX and vSphere 4.0 and other applications.
• Central Management Console / User Interface: allows IT professionals to easily manage all storage from a central management console built on the same tree structure used in Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere.

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Last week we had a meeting with a McAfee Sales Engineer and he told us something I have been waiting for for a long time.

McAfee now has a product especially for virtualized environments, McAfee MOVE (Management for Optimized Virtual Environments). After Trend Micro, McAfee is now the second anti-virus company, that I know of, which has a product especially for virtual environments.

McAfee’s Management for Optimized Virtual Environments (MOVE) platform is combines speed ad security by significantly reducing the overhead of protecting individual machines in a VMware or Citrix virtual environment. Support for Microsoft Hyper-V is not available yet.

McAfee MOVE does this by offloading all anti-virus tasks to an appliance/server which needs to be installed on each ESX host or XenServer in a cluster. The only McAfee components which needs to be installed on the virtual server or desktop is the McAfee MOVE client and the ePO agent.

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During VMworld Europe 2010 in Copenhagen I will be keeping a diary to show what a blogger’s life is all about.

Thursday 14 October 2010

Alex working very early

6:30

Time to get up my phone is blinking with a reminder for the Zimbra breakfast meeting in the Scandic Hotel. The ritual stuff to be dealt with, washing, shaving and getting dressed. Damn it is early but everything for a good cause.

7:00

Alex and I leave the hotel to the metro station through a light moist dark morning. A lot of activity along the line. Erik and Anne Jan still firm a sleep. We arrive at the metro station in about 15 minutes. Just missed the one on the platform so just will have to wait for the next one in 6 minutes. I must say transportation is very good in Copenhagen. Yes the metro arrived and we get in along the line more and more folks from Denmark join in and get ready for work.

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Today one of my colleagues pointed out some of the changes around the RES Software product suite, which probably will be announced on the Citrix Synergy 2010 in Berlin, tomorrow.

RES Software has restyled there logo and color scheme. They also renamed RES PowerFuse en RES Wisdom into RES Workspace Manager and RES Automation Manager. The new names sound logical to me.

It looks like they pulled out the RES Subscriber feature out of the PowerFuse Enterprise edition and made it an additional product named RES Virtual Desktop Extender (VDX). Also there will be no more different editions to choose from instead you can choose the functionality in modules, based on your needs.

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We recently received an update about the new stuff that is coming from Dell EqualLogic. Because a lot the information was under NDA so I can’t go into details or give you release dates.

What’s here already?

Last year Dell released the 10GB connections for the PS series. This 10GB connection speeds are mostly done because the marketing asked for it, because the customers asked for it. There are rarely used cases where the 10GB connections make sense but in 95% of all cases it doesn’t give you extra performance.

The bottleneck is often not the connection speed but the spindle speeds limits of the disk themselves. Because of the adaptive load balancing of the PS series the 1GB connections are used very efficiently. When used with the MPIO drivers from Dell EqualLogic you can gain a lot extra performance from the network connections.

So what is coming this year:

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When using a Cisco 3750 stack connected through stackwise technology you can add or remove a Cisco switch while the stack stays on. If you are adding or removing a switch from the stack, it is very important that the switch is turned OFF. The rest of the stack can keep doing its business.

For adding a switch to the stack follow these steps:

Step 1) On the new switch give the global command: switch stack-member-number provision type

Type is the type of switch you are adding to the stack.

When adding for example a third Cisco switch to the Cisco stack, use the following command:

switch 3 provision ws3750g-24t

Step 2) Power off the new stack member

Step 3) Connect the new member to the Cisco stack using the stacking cables, 1 loop at a time.

Step 4) Power on the new stack member. The switch will come alive and will receive the Cisco IOS version from the master, when that is completed it will be ready to service network requests.

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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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The last few months we where asked several times to reset a password set on the main account for Dell EqualLogic storage, also known as the grpadmin account.

If you really don’t know the password set on the grpadmin but still have physical access to it you can start a recovery procedure to reset the grpadmin account back to the default password: grpadmin.

Important: Because you must power-cycle one group member as part of the password reset procedure, volumes with data stored on that member will be unavailable and active iSCSI connections to those volumes will be lost until the member is restarted. You may want to warn users of any impending offline volumes and iSCSI disconnections before resetting the password.

To temporarily reset the grpadmin account password to the default factory-set password, follow these steps:

1.) On one group member, connect the appropriate serial cable to serial port 0 (the correct cable will be different on different models of the PS Array) on the active control module. The active control module is indicated by the green control module status LED labeled ACT. The status LEDs are located on the controllers sometimes on the left side or next to the serial port on other controllers.

2.) Turn off power to the member (if you have dual power supplies, turn off both power supplies). Volumes with data located on the member will be offline and iSCSI connections to those volumes will be lost until the member is restarted.

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Last Wednesday VKernel released a new free tool which delivers capacity alerts to the desktop.

Capacity View provides quick visibility and alerting to the storage and server capacity issues in your VMware virtualized infrastructure. I downloaded the toolto give it a testdrive and it is very easy to setup, the download and install took only a few minutes and in no time I had it up and running and connected to vCenter.

Capacity View identifies capacity based performance issues such as virtual machine I/O latency or under-allocated CPU, memory or storage. Additionally, it monitors your available capacity for new VM deployments and shows you which over-provisioned VMs can be rightsized to free up wasted capacity.

Capacity View also provides you with key virtualization deployment statistics such as:

• Numbers of VMs, hosts, data stores, clusters and resource pools
• Total available physical resources (CPU, memory and storage)
• Total allocated virtual resources as a % of physical

More information can be found on the VKernel website and VKernel Capacity View can be downloaded here.

Yesterday RES Software announced the availability of the new version of their Workspace Management solution RES PowerFuse 2010.

In our projects we often use RES PowerFuse as an additional tool to virtualize the last step within desktop virtualization. It simplifies the management of the virtual desktops and enables a fully roamed environment for end users.

In summary, new key features within PowerFuse 2010 include:

• New Desktop Sampler, Desktop Designer and Workspace Model features
  RES PowerFuse 2010 provides the ability to sample and analyze existing desktops prior to workspace implementation, ensuring a smooth roll-out and minimal impact to the productivity of users;
• Zero profile technology
  This provides a new method for storing and applying user settings independently from the user’s profile, alleviating the profile management issues that often plague IT and making performance better for the user;
• Support for Microsoft SQL Azure databases
  RES PowerFuse now enables IT professionals to take advantage of Microsoft’s highly available, cost-effective Azure cloud offering, by enabling them to store user configurations in the cloud.

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When designing a virtual infrastructure an important bit in the design is the storage infrastructure also called the Storage Area Network (SAN). In a SAN based on iSCSI we often use Cisco 3750 switches, but when you are going to select the right Cisco 3750 for the job the fun starts. You will be dazzled by the amount of different product numbers and will be busy deciphering the product code.

The product code for a Cisco 3750 switch is build up like this:

WS-C3750a-xxbc-dee

WS stands for Switch
C stands for Catalyst series
3750 stands for the 3750 product line

a >> blank, G, E
blank = classic 3750 switch, 6.5 or 13.1 mpps forwarding rate
G = all ports are gigabit, 35 or 38 mpps forwarding rate
E = enterprise line, 65.5 or 101.2 mpps forwarding rate

xx >> 12, 16, 24, 48
12 = 12 Ethernet ports
16 = 16 Ethernet ports
24 = 24 Ethernet ports
48 = 48 Ethernet ports

b >> T, P, F, D, W
T = Ethernet ports
P = Power over Ethernet

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On a regular basis we have info sessions with our most important vendors.  Last week we had a session with HP to tell us more about virtualization in their hardware products. The session was especially targeted at Flex-10. Flex-10 is the way how HP breaks s a 2 x 10Gb Ethernet pipe into a flexible, easy to change, smaller Ethernet ports.

Why is this so important for us virtual friends? Of course it is a huge cost saver not only in hardware but also in management of the environment but the most important thing is that it opens up a lot of new virtual design opportunities.

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One of the coolest things is that we now can make a design for up to 4 blade chassis with each physical 16 server blades and let’s say 320 virtual servers where all the traffic between the servers never leaves the blade chassis. It is all handled with the blade chassis. Also all of the vSphere traffic like VMotion and service console can be handled within the chassis at 10Gb speeds.

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Today Danny Claproth from Vizioncore had a very interesting message on his twitter, “Vizioncore vFoglight 6 is officially GA“

This is the long awaited version which we heard a lot about during our vFogLight training at the end of October.

vFogLight 6 Pro is available in two versions, the x86 version for small environments only and the x64 for the larger enterprise implementations, and it offers a new and improved user interface, report wizard, FAQs, improved scalability and the enhanced capacity planning feature.

Also vFogLight Pro has full support for the complete VMware vSphere 4 suite, so ESX 4, ESXi 4 and vCenter 4 are supported

A full list of features can be found here and the release note can be found here.

A trail version can be downloaded here.

A few years ago I didn’t pay much attention to the thin clients. If a customer wanted them fine, you choose a model started a pilot, bought the thin client and you were done.  As we now see that Green Computing is no longer a hype and the interest in centralizing desktops is growing every day. All of a sudden the possibilities and choices in the thin client market are booming. I thought the time was right to inform myself more about the thin client.

Last week I attended the AVNET “Thin is In Event 2009” it was a well organized event with a quick presentation of the Wyse, Chip PC, Igel and Samsung products. Afterwards there was the opportunity to meet with all the vendors to speak about their products and to see some live action. The funny thing about Thin Clients is that they are becoming more and more fat clients!! If you want a flexible solution with all the features and a minimal risk of non functioning peripherals you are forced to use the WinXPe or the new Windows Embedded Standard.

The conclusion for this afternoon was. Thin clients are al the same and yet they are all different. What I mean is they all provide their share in making IT more green. They all provide tooling for management of the thin client firmware. They all make maintenance a lot easier, etc, etc and yet they all have a unique selling point. So if you are thinking about centralizing your desktop environment define your wishes, select two vendors and two models of each vendor a start your pilot.

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My week started on a down with me being ill for two days but it finished on a high with two days of Vizioncore vFoglight training.

The training was given by Paul Jackson, an external consultant, with a bit of support of Danny Claproth from Vizioncore Benelux.

vFoglight is derived from Quest’s Foglight which is a tool to manage and monitor a physical environment and is designed as a virtualization management solution that provides performance monitoring, capacity planning, and chargeback for virtual and physical infrastructures.

It is offered in two editions – vFoglight Standard (SE) and vFoglight Pro. vFoglight SE is monitor the performance of their virtual infrastructures and the Pro version adds advanced capabilities for Capacity Planning, Chargeback, Physical Operating System Monitoring, Third-Party Integration, etc.

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I just finished a great webinar by Randy Groves, Chief Technology Officer at Teradici Corporation.

The challenge for this and upcoming years is to give the most demanding users a true user experience while working on a true zero client through any network. The Teradici corporation is far ahead of the rest with their PCoIP protocol. No surprise VMware embraced the technology and the Teradici corporation by working together to answer the challenge.

The entire focus of the Teradici company is PCoIP, the DNA of the team working on the PCoIP protocol is from big and important companies like Broadcom, Intel, Nvidia and others.

Why should you want to use your graphics remotely you ask?
Several branch of industries choose for running graphics in the datacenter because of several reasons. For instance the healthcare industry and because of security, Media & Entertainment and CAD/CAM because of the enormous power they can use in a datacenter and efficient way of using resources and you can connect to it from anywhere. So designers aren’t convicted to 1 pDesktop, if that 1 breaks down it will be a big loss, instead they can use almost any device to do their work from anywhere connecting to their vDesktop or even vDesktops. Also branches like the Trading Floor, Air Traffic control and others who want space savings are using graphics remotely.

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This week I attend the launch party from Trend Micro. They presented their latest products which are fully virtualization aware.

First they introduced the new way of defending viruses and malware. Because nowadays the viruses and malware changes signatures so quickly the signatures database grows also so quickly. In the long run the signatures database takes so much internal memory. Especially in virtual environments this becomes a waste of useful resources. Trend Micro is the first vendor that takes a different approach. Instead of keeping a signatures database on every machine (virtual or physical) they query a cloud based database which is always up to date and always up and running. It is more like a framework and it called Trend Micro™ Smart Protection Network.

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This morning we had a meeting with Vizioncore/Quest. Danny Claproth and Jan-Willem Koppers informed us on their complete range of vProducts.

Vizioncore offers a wide range of products which add additional features or deliver VMware-like features. I’ve not had very much time to test their products yet but I knew most of them by name and function. After attending Danny’s presentation I will definitely make time to check out their neat products.

The ones I will definitely check out are vFoglight, vOptimizer, vConverter and of course Virtualization EcoShell.

vFoglight
From what I saw vFoglight is a brilliant virtualization management solution which delivers performance-, capacity- and cost monitoring to improve resource utilization, recover costs and quickly find bottlenecks in your infrastructure.

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