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

VMware has just released the new 4.0.1 version of their VMware View VDI suite.

VMware View 4.0.1 is a maintenance release that fixes some known issues in the previous releases.

So, what’s new in version 4.0.1?

• Support for vCenter 2.5 Update 6 and ESX 3.5 Update 5;
• Enhancements to the PCoIP Display Protocol.
  • PCoIP now supports the following features:
    Virtual Printing, which allows end users to use local or network printers from a View desktop without requiring that additional print drivers be installed in the View desktop.
  • Single sign-on support for third party providers such as Sentillion and Imprivata.
  • View Client supports international keyboards when using PCoIP.

According to news reports a small plane has crashed in Palo Alto this morning, causing a power outage.

At 7:50 AM, shortly after take-off a small plane crashed into the power lines and exploded on impact, killing all three people onboard which were  all employees at Tesla Motors.

The power outage caused a phone outage at VMware headquarters. Currently VMware Support is still available – phones working – 1 877 4VMWARE.

VMware Support is currently accepting ONLY Production Down Service Requests through supportvmware@gmail.com with:

1. Company
2. Contact
3. Phone#

For critical License issues please email vmwarelicensesupport@gmail.com with the same information.

Due to the power outage and the phone outage todays VMware community roundtable is canceled.

Regularly I receive question from worried colleagues who have passed their VCP410 exam but haven’t received their certificate and welcome kit yet.

The only answer I had until now was the one I picked up on the VMware communities website stating that VMware had delayed the shipment of certificates and welcome kits due to the introduction of their new logo.

But this weekend I finally received my VCP 4 certificate and the long awaited Workstation 7 license after passing my VCP410 exam on September 4th 2009.

So If you have passed your VCP410 exam and haven’t received your certificate yet, it’s on it’s way (I hope ).

Today VMware organized the vForum 2010 in Nijkerk, the Netherlands, and during this day Dutch VMUG-er Viktor van den Berg interviewed Richard Garsthagen. Richard is one of the organizers of VMworld and during this interview he revealed some news about VMworld 2010.

First of all VMworld 2010 USA will be held from August 30th until September 2nd  in the Moscone Center in San Fransisco. The European version in the Bella Center in Copenhagen will take place from October 12th until October 14th.

Talking with colleagues and community members the issue which is immediately brought up is ‘Can we expect any news in Europe or is all news presented one month earlier?‘ Richards response is that VMworld is not primarily meant for product news but it’s a three day training event.

The biggest news Richard bring is that VMware is going to promote the experts. How? During VMworld 2010 you can get educated in four different ways. First of all you can attend breakout sessions or attend the self passed labs. A new item is that a you can attend smaller, more private group sessions. But when this is not private enough you can register for a 10 minute one-on-one private session with one of the VMware experts! Very cool!

A second great new feature …..

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May 21th VMware released their new flagship product VMware vSphere 4 which should bring us tons of new features and performance improvements.

But how is the vSphere experience almost 9 months later?

Starting with the installation and setup experience, my personal experience with vSphere is very good. During the installation and setup of VMware ESX or ESXi 3.x I experienced a lot of issues like BIOS settings causing HA issues, HA issues when changing the ESX IP addresses, Problems with VMware Update Manager and faulty HP USB sticks. We even created a HA checklist for you to easily address HA issues.

Once up and running ESX(i) 3.x ran fine with the occasional HA error which 99% of the time could be fixed by reconfiguring HA from Virtual Center.

Now with vSphere the installation and setup is simple, error free and straight forward. Setup HA in the cluster properties wait for all progress indicators to reach 100% and you’re done.

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January 3rd, Eric Siebert, started the Top 25 VMware/Virtualization bloggers contest. During two weeks everybody in the community could vote for their favorite Top 10 and the challenge was to get VMGuru.nl into the Top 25 and to knock Duncan Epping from the top spot . This last challenge proved to be very very difficult and again, Duncan took the top spot. So until July 2010 Yellow Bricks is the #1 blog in the community.

And how did VMGuru.nl do? Due to all your votes we finished at a respectable #18 in the Top 25 VMware/Virtualization bloggers and we’re very proud of it.

So, for everyone who voted for us, thank you very very much!

You can check out the complete score list here.

It was a rumor for some time but 45 minutes ago Steve Herrod, CTO of VMware, acknowledged that VMware has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Zimbra from Yahoo.

First of all, for those of you that don’t know, Zimbra delivers open-source email, calendaring, and collaboration software for deployment within companies of all sizes, as well as to cloud and hosting providers offering mail services over the web.  From a business perspective, Zimbra is one of the most popular collaboration software offerings, with more than 55,000,000 users and a subscriber base that is growing rapidly.

So, why does VMware buy their own e-mail. calendering and collaboration platform? This has nothing to do with virtualization, right?

According to Steve Herrod there are two main reasons for the acquisition:

1. Zimbra will further VMware’s mission of simplifying IT.
   

   VMware’s mission is to simplify IT, and every VMware product focuses on attacking the complexity and rigidity that has crept into this world. In many ways we see the excitement over cloud computing to be a longing for a simpler, more flexible way of doing computing. The VMware strategy is to help customers achieve cloud-like efficiency and operational improvements across the major IT infrastructure investment areas.

2. Zimbra will add to the portfolio of offerings VMware provides to the VMware vCloud partner.
   

   This second motivation is very much related to the above point. We launched our VMware vCloud™ initiative just over a year ago to develop an ecosystem of telecom, hosting, and service providers that offer cloud solutions based on VMware technologies. This ecosystem has grown by leaps and bounds, quickly surpassing 1,000 members. Today we offer this ecosystem VMware vSphere-based compute and storage infrastructure upon which they can offer what is commonly referred to as “infrastructure-as-a-service” (IaaS). With the acquisition of SpringSource, we can enable our partners to offer a higher level of cloud-based service; one where programmers can write their code and let the cloud handle the details of how and where it runs. This is commonly referred to as “platform-as-a-service” (PaaS). And with Zimbra, we will now offer our partners an even higher level of cloud capability; one where customers can simply use an application without worrying about the details of how and where it runs. This top layer of the hierarchy is known as “software-as-a-service” (SaaS).

With the coming acquisition of Zimbra I think VMware is trying to fight of their link with Microsoft and deliver a total package without being bound to a Microsoft operating system or Exchange implementation. This might be a smart move in the ongoing hypervisor battle because the Microsoft marketing machine is coming weather we like it or not.

For the complete article from Steve Herrod look here.

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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Almost every week I listen to the podcast from the Communities Round-table, just to make sure that I didn’t miss anything important.

What is this Communities Round-table? Well, who better than John Troyer, Sr Mgr VMware Communities, can explain what it is.

Each week, we’ll bring together experts and leaders from the VMware Communities and virtualization blogs to discuss the interesting topics in virtualization. Think of this as if it were a group meeting up at VMworld over a pint to chat about the latest news. We record the call and make it available for your pod cast listening pleasure. Listen with the player over on the right, download directly, or use the pod cast feed from TalkShoe.

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A couple of weeks ago I talked to a co-worker who is responsible for selling VMware licenses and other VMware related stuff. As a VMware partner it isn’t always easy to manage the licenses for customers nor selling or upgrading their licenses if they bought them from another partner in the past.

A lot of the times multiple people register VMware licenses. For example, if I am the person that has to request or register licenses I probably will do it with my own VMware account. If I leave the company the licenses still are connected to me as a person. I know you can use a general account and register your licenses with that, but that goes against anything I ever learnt about security and identity management.

If you already have licenses there is also no easy way to ‘push’ them to another account, for example a general account. You can do this through the support desk, but takes all kinds of effort.

From a viewpoint of the license admininstrator it’s hard to keep track of all licenses that a company has for VMware products.

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November 4th we published an article on Virtual Infrastructure best practices and the response was overwhelming. During the last month we received a lot of questions regarding best practices on VDI/VMware View. When I then read a comment from VMware’s evangelist, Richard Garsthagen, that the attention on blogs for VMware View was minimal I thought well let’s extend our View articles/knowledge base.

So, VMware View best practices. First of all check the article on Virtual Infrastructure best practices to create a good understanding for the underlying virtual infrastructure challenges.

So hereby my list of best practices which I gather from VMware KB articles, instructor led VMware View design training and the VMware community:

• CPU sizing;
• Memory sizing;
• Storage sizing;
• Network sizing.

If you have additions or new insights please reply.

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While I was updating the Determining VMware vCenter and ESX Build Numbers post I thought I would semi-automate the updating of the post with new build numbers for new releases, while working on it I started too fill an excel sheet and ended up with an excel sheet with the following products and build numbers for easy reference:

VMware vSphere 4 Suite (combines several products)
VMware Infrastructure 3 Suite (combines several products)
Cisco Nexus v1000 (1.0)
VMware ESXi (4.0, 3.5, 3.0)
VMware ESX  (4.0, 3.5, 3.0, 2.5, 2.0, 1.5, 1.0)
VMware Server (2.0, 1.0)
VMware vCenter Server (4.0, 2.5, 2.0)
VMware vCenter Converter Standalone (4.0, 3.0)
VMware vCenter Lab Manager (4.0, 3.0, 2.5, 2.4)
VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (4.0, 1.0)
VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat (5.5)
VMware vCenter Lifecycle Manager (1.0)
VMware vCenter CapacityIQ (1.0)
VMware vCenter AppSpeed (1.0)
VMware vCenter Chargeback (1.0)
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The last breakout session we attended the XTG vCenter Server Heartbeat workshop, a quick way to get familiar with a new VMware product.

The instructor first introduced us to the product and discussed some installation and configuration hints and tips.

After that we quickly started with preparing and cloning the vCenter Server and installing and configuring the vCenter Server Heartbeat product.

The workshop certainly was useful but in a different way you would probably expect.

After the workshop Anne Jan and I discussed our experiences with the product and we quickly agreed that VMware could have spent more time OEM-ing the former Neverfail product to give it a VMware-like interface instead of the 1980’s Windows 3.11 interface it has now. Besides that the configuration of the product has a very high tweaker-level. In our opinion this is a 0.9 version and in the 1.0 versionVMware should definitely address the interface and configuration look and feel.

Nevertheless VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat does what it is supposed to as we saw during the lab exercises where we did a clean failover and finally caused a BSOD which vCenter Server Heartbeat handled perfectly.

I wonder if customers are willing to pay so much money for a product which isn’t worthy the VMware name based on its ancient interface. I know I will be having a very hard time to convince customers to use this to achieve a very high vCenter protection level even when it’s clear that the use case is definitively there.

Our blogging colleagues at Virtualistic.nl keep a video blog on their site.

You can watch VMUG keynote and presentation ‘live’ from Nieuwegein (Netherlands) on their website.

Pictures from Breakout session 2 by Bouke Groenescheij (Jume.nu) can be found here.

Breakouts in sessions 2:
- Virtualiseren van Exchange by Jan Willem Lammers – VMware
- How to monitor, manage & optimize a virtual environment by Danny Claproth – Vizioncore
- Project VRC by Ruben Spruijt – PQR/Jeroen van de Kamp – Login Consultants

Pictures from Breakout session 1 by Bouke Groenescheij (Jume.nu) can be found here.

Breakouts in sessions 1:
- VMware’s latest Virtual Desktop Infrastructure by Rory Clements – VMware
- Managing VMware vSphere 4 m.b.v. de Virtualization EcoShell by Eric Sloof – NTPro.nl
- Why the Virtual Data Center Starts with Compellent by Steven Dahlin – Compellent

For all the folks that didn’t hear about the EcoShell yet: The Virtualization EcoShell makes it possible to create scripts to automate management tasks for your virtual infrastructure, all from a user friendly user interface.

These scripts can be saved for later use.

This is not only good news for the lazy or time driven admin, but also from the point of making less mistakes. Actions can be run time after time at the same way.

The Virtualization EcoShell divides everything into the following actions:

• gather
• filter
• remediate
• report
• integrate

One of the items that is very interesting is vDiagram. vDiagram automagically creates a diagram of the items you want to report, for example which virtual machines are connected to what vSwitch.

Best Practice Filters are a great addition to the Virtualization EcoShell. For example: Give me all virtual machines with a connected CD-ROM drive that prevent VMotions. ESX hosts with NICs slower than 1GBit/s or VM’s with snapshots older than 7 days are part of the best practice filters.

Alan Renouf has put a lot of his PowerShell scripts he posted earlier on virtu-al.net in a PowerPack for the Virtualization EcoShell. vCheck is one of those things.

Eric has given a demo on his laptop. ESXi in a VMware Workstation 7 installation with a couple of virtual machines in it.

Without a line of programming or scripting he connects to the ESX host. Just by clicking he changes the connection of a couple of VMs to a different vSwitch.

If you want to change the code behind actions, no worry. Since everything is based on PowerShell commandlets you can change the code yourself.

Even creating your own PowerPack is very easy. As a demo Eric created a vmug PowerPack with a script he copied from the site from Alan. Sounds good, a vmug PowerPack.

Checkout  http://www.thevesi.org and ofcourse the site of Eric Sloof, ntpro.nl

Books that Eric mentioned in his presentation:

• vSphere Quick Start Guide
• Managing VMware Infrastructure with Windows PowerShell
• VMware VI and vSphere SDK

Twitter aliases to follow:

• carter shanklin @cshanklin
• alan renouf @alanrenouf
• hal rottenberg @halr9000
• luc dekens @LucD22
• Dmitry Sotnikov @DSotnikov
• hugo peeters @hugopeeters
• Arne Fokkema @afokkema
• Eric Sloof @esloof
• Scott Herold @vmguru

Scott Herold took the stage after Eric. He showed vRangerPro and the integration with the Virtualization EcoShell. From within the Virtualization EcoShell you are able to make charts from your backup times for example and use this in a monthly report.Even integration with vControl, a workflow application, is very easy from within the Virtualization EcoShell.

Scott is out in the exhibition hall to give more info and demo of the Virtualization EcoShell.

Keynote pictures by Bouke Groenescheij (Jume.nu) can be found here.

Today is the fifth Dutch VMUG event and the interest is overwhelming with 600 attendees.

VMGuru.nl attends for the first time this year, helping out with the event build up and attendee registration.

The first pictures can be found at the website of Bouke Groenescheij (Jume.nu).

9:30
The event is opened by Viktor van den Berg, followed by a video  message from VMware CTO, Steve Herrod.

9:45
Our third speaker is Richard Garsthagen, VMware’s Evangelist, talking about the road VMware has travelled in the last 11 years. As always Richard’s speeches are very enthusiastic and full of energy. He explains that VMware’s future is not all about virtual machines any more which is illustrated by their new logo where they stripped the three squares which represent virtual machines. VMware is becoming more and more about enabling companies to addept their IT to their business needs. So it’s not all about hypervisors and virtual infrastructure anymore it’s about enabling companies to becoming more flexible and thereby improving profit, quality and client satisfaction.

10:20
One way to do this is VMware’s implementation of the cloud and as Richard quotes Paul Maritz, ‘The cloud is not a destination but a way to do computing‘. At this moment it’s not possible yet to move a VM from your private cloud to a public cloud by a simple mouse click but it is already possible to run a VM in a service provider’s datacenter where you pay by use. But VMware is doing everything to make this possible in the future. One of the products VMware has released their first products to support this cloud idea namely vSphere 4 and CapacityIQ. The last products enables the pay by use model which is one of the prerequisites for the public cloud.

10:30
Richard finished with some nice tech news.

• VMware started with VMware Knowledge base TV
• Every Friday VMware NL launches an online webinar with every Friday new, different and interesting topics.
• VMworld Europe 2010 in Copenhagen will be much more oriented on networking.

Next up for me, the Scripting breakout session by Eric Sloof from NTPro.nl and Scot Herold from Vizioncore/VMGuru.com

Tomorrow is the big day for more than 600 VMware enthusiasts in the Netherlands with the start of the annual dutch VMUG event.

Anne Jan, Arjan  and I will be attending the VMUG event, you can follow us on VMGuru.nl or follow us using twitter.

If you’re not attending and want to follow the latest news you can also follow the #DutchVMUG tag or one of the attendees below. (Thnx to NTPro.nl)

More info on the Dutch VMUG can be found at www.vmug.nl (dutch).

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 have just updated the list after receiving word the new version is out and the build numbers are known for vSphere 4 and vCenter Server. So I compiled a list of build numbers and updates from the patch notes for VMware ESX and VMware vCenter Server.

vCenter Server 4.0 Update 1 | 19 Nov 2009 | Build 208156

vCenter Server 4.0 | 05 May 2009 | Build 162902

VirtualCenter 2.5 Server Update 5 | 10 Jul 2009 | Build 174791 (English version)

VirtualCenter 2.5 Server Update 4 | 23 Feb 2009 | Build 147633 (English version)

VirtualCenter 2.5 Server Update 3 | 03 Oct 2008 | Build 119598 (English version)

VirtualCenter 2.5 Server Update 2 | 25 July 2008 | Build 104217 (English version)

VirtualCenter 2.5 Server Update 1 | 10 Apr 2008 | Build 84767 (English version)

VirtualCenter 2.5 Server | 10 Dec 2007 | Build 64201

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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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